The secret life of MC Escher and his impossible worlds
You are walking up a staircase that winds up to the top of a tall square tower. It ascends one side, then the next, then the next – and then suddenly you are right back where you started. This is the kind of problem people who are trapped in the geometrically impossible, yet still strangely plausible, worlds of MC Escher have to deal with all the time. In his mind-boggling creations, dimensions collide and normality dissolves. Looking into his pictures is like standing on the very edge of a cliff – and being right down at the bottom at the same time.
The Dutchman’s illusions have been famous and beloved since the 1950s, when spaced-out fans first started claiming to see hemp plants hidden in his art. And now we have Kaleidocycles, a Taschen book about the artist featuring paper puzzle kits that allow you to actually build his paradoxical structures at home, unlikely as that may seem. The tome has just been reissued in time for Christmas and the 50th anniversary of his death next year. His work does seem perfect for the festive season, given it’s all fun and games. Or at least that’s how it seems, initially.
Escher’s visionary flair did not just confine itself to art: he also intruded into the world of science. His profound yet impossible perspectives seem to prophesy the greatest tricks of virtual reality. Yet Maurits Cornelis Escher – born in Leeuwarden, a city north of Amsterdam, in 1898 – showed absolutely no aptitude for any academic subject at school. His father was a hydraulic engineer – an important job in a country with so much land reclaimed from the sea. Although he despaired of his son, he supported young Maurits in his studies at art college in Haarlem, and in his travels around southern Europe, where he spent years developing his style.
In the 1920s, Piet Mondrian and the De Stijl movement were taking Dutch art into pure abstraction. Escher, meanwhile, was in Italy – using traditional printmaking skills to depict timeless cities on picturesque hilltops. These designs would become the building blocks of his deceiving universe. A thickly inked engraving of St Peter’s that he made in 1935 takes a spectacular, god’s-eye view of the Vatican basilica’s vast interior from up inside the dome. We see tiny people on the floor far below, as columns plummet down towards them in rushing, scary perspective.
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/dec/09/mick-jagger-explaining-cosmos-secret-life-mc-escher-impossible-worlds-stones