Here we tap into dates from M.C. Eschers life and work, jumping through time but always in the now. All year round you can enjoy background stories, anecdotes and trivia about this fascinating artist.
Like an intriguing jewel on a jet-black background, the shells from this wood engraving illuminate the immense dark space behind it. Concentric Rinds is one of Escher’s most ingenious works as well as one of his most mysterious.
Philippe Druillet, born on 28 June 1944, is known for his baroque drawings and bizarre science fiction stories. After having worked as a photographer for several years, Druillet made his debut in comics in 1966 with 'Lone Sloane, le Mystère des Abîmes', a comic book that drew inspiration from Druillet's favorite writers H.P. Lovecraft en A.E. van Vogt. Later, Druillet would design several covers for re-issues of Lovecraft's work, and a number of filmposters.
‘Imagine being without Tolkien! The lonely evenings are the most difficult for my patience. But he helps me through them with his fantastic world of Hobbits, Elves, Dwarves and good wizards, contrasting with the most horrible, diabolical monsters’.
This ode to the British writer and academic John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973), who became world famous for his fantasy cycle The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and the posthumously published The Silmarillion, is found in a letter dated 29 June 1962 that Escher wrote to his son George. His son Arthur had treated him to a copy of The Hobbit earlier that year, a book Escher read voraciously whilst bedridden, when reading became a useful means of escape.
In June 1932, Escher was commissioned by the Dutch Historical Institute in Rome. The institute wanted to devote attention to a church whose visibility was threatened by the emerging new building sites in the capital. In the lithograph that Escher produced of this San Michele dei Frisoni (the Frisian Church), he allows himself a considerable degree of artistic licence. He does not depict the current version of the church (built in 1141) but instead the original version, which was destroyed by the Normans in 1084 during the Investiture Controversy. This controversy is known as the conflict between the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV and the then pope Gregory VII.
Last week a display case was revealed at Escher in The Palace, containing a unique bequest. It was given to us by Mr and Mrs Hoogendijk-Floor. They purchased several works by M.C. Escher over the years, and these were recently bequeathed to Escher in The Palace. The works they owned include a vignette featuring fish and the accompanying woodblock. Very few of Escher's woodblocks are extant and intact, and most of them are privately owned. Hence this gift is invaluable to the museum.
Escher was a walker and an observer. Fortunately, these two pursuits go hand in hand. In his Italian years, Escher went on a long hike every spring through areas such as the Abruzzo and Calabria, which were still quite inhospitable. While doing so, he looked around in awe and contemplated the beautiful nature and idiosyncratic landscape that he found there. As an observer he had an eye for the micro as well as the macro. He could look at a plant or an insect with just as much admiration as a mountain or a coastline. After he moved to Baarn in 1941, he continued to be a fanatical walker and observer, spending many hours wandering through the woods around his home and paying just as much attention to the typically Dutch nature as to Italian nature.
In May 1971, Escher produced his final tessellation, a drawing in India ink and watercolour of a figure that he himself called a ‘little ghost’. It was the last in a long series of tessellations produced in notebooks, but it was also a remarkable drawing in another respect. In 1962 the British mathematician Roger Penrose travelled to the Netherlands and he visited Escher in his house in Baarn. The two had got to know each other after Penrose saw work by Escher during the International Mathematical Congress in 1954. They started an exchange of letters that would lead to the print Ascending and Descending in 1960. Throughout his career Penrose was fascinated by tessellations, a fascination that he shared with Escher. Penrose received a print from Escher and in return he gave his host a wooden puzzle.
From 5 to 31 May 1955 the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam hosted an exhibition under the name Kunstenaars herdenken 5 mei (‘Artists Commemorate 5 May’). This coincided with the first national commemoration: 5 May 1955 was the first time that Liberation Day was celebrated as a public holiday in the Netherlands. The exhibition was an initiative of the eponymous foundation, which was founded on 1 April of that year. Escher was represented by such works as Other World and Rippled Surface.
On 28 April 1955, Escher was working in corduroy trousers and shirt sleeves in his studio when he was visited by an alderman and the municipal secretary of the city of Baarn. What he was working on at that precise moment is not clear. It could be reprints of existing prints, e.g. his four-metre-long Metamorphosis II, which was in high demand. Or his lithograph Liberation, which he had been commissioned to produce for the 10th Liberation Day on 5 May of that year. The alderman and the secretary told him that the queen intended to appoint him as a Knight in the Order of Orange-Nassau.