Would you believe it? The art of M.C. Escher

A version of the following preview of the new M.C. Escher exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh appeared in The Herald Arts supplement on 27/6/15

ON A cold winter morning at the tail end of last year, a small group of arts journalists gathered in the elegant Timorous Beasties wallpaper-clad office of Sir John Leighton, Director-General of The National Galleries of Scotland (NGS).
We were there to find out what the 2015 NGS programme had in store for the nation’s art lovers. As Sir John ran through the schedule, he told us the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art would be mounting the country’s first major exhibition of work by M.C Escher.
An audible ripple of surprise ran through the room. One of our number said he had an Escher poster in his bedroom as a boy, while another wondered if his popularity in the gaming world (Escher’s work inspired video games such as Monument Valley and Echochrome) had led to this exhibition.
It was one of these moments I thought I was finally going to be rumbled... who was this artist everyone knew about and I didn’t?
As senior curator, Patrick Elliot, talked through the Escher story, describing the Dutch graphic artist, who died in 1972, as a ‘one-man art movement’, images flashed onto a screen. Slowly, It dawned on me that the work of Maurits Cornelis Escher was incredibly familiar.
Like Elliot, I grew up in the 1970s when the prints of M.C. Escher were ubiquitous. Now that I think of it, when I was in primary school, I even tried to replicate his giant Eye (1946) mezzotint, which is on display in The Amazing Worls of M.C. Escher, which opens in Edinburgh today.
Escher’s eye-fooling artwork found its way onto album covers (Mott the Hoople and the Scaffold LPs were graced by his work), posters, biscuit tins and tea-towels. A superb draughtsman, his work was precise, illusionary, patterned and graphic – yet often colourless. It lacked the showmanship of the Surrealist movement yet it contrived to create a parallel universe of existential strangeness.
Impossibly detailed and packed with trickery, his visual language talks out staircases with neither beginning nor end and landscapes with tessellated (checkered) patterns which morph into creatures such as lizards or birds.
Escher, who lived a quietly ordered life with his wife and three children in Baarn, a small town to the south-east of Amsterdam, was venerated in equal measure by hippies and mathematicians. The former fell for his mind-bending imagery, while the latter appreciated his intuitive grasp of symmetry, geometry and complex mathematical principles.
For all his popularity, Escher somehow appears to have fallen through the ‘proper artist’ net and there is only one work by him in a public collection in Britain. That work, Day and Night, is in the Hunterian collection at Glasgow University, having been acquired by the geography department.
This new exhibition looks set to alter the way posterity views the quietly enigmatic Dutchman, who famously gave Mick Jagger short shrift when he wrote him a ‘Dear Maurits’ letter asking if he would design an album cover for The Rolling Stones.
“Who is this Jagger person?” the artist famously responded.
Over 100 works, including original drawings, prints, mezzotints, woodcuts and lithographs, are on display at Modern Two, having been lent by the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague. This display will showcase Escher’s most-celebrated prints alongside lesser known lithographs and woodcuts as well as archive material.
According to Elliot, who has spent the last year getting under this enigmatic artist’s skin, Escher’s work has tended to flummox art historians.
“It looks nineteenth century; it’s not surrealist and mathematicians and hippies liked it,” he says. “I knew Escher as a schoolboy in the 1970s but I did history of art and as an artist you were told to ‘unlearn’ Escher. You quickly realised you were not meant to like his work.
“Years later, when I saw his work on show in Holland, it occurred to me that you never see his work in an exhibition. I thought at that point it would be terrific to do a major show. Up until now, only two small galleries in the UK have held exhibitions and that in itself interested me, given the level of his popularity from the 1950s until his death.
“I’m expecting it to be a very popular exhibition, given the amount of interest there has been in it already,” he says. “He’s been seen in the past as a graphic artist as opposed to a proper artist. I think he got too famous but hopefully this exhibition will give him his due.”
I think it’s going to be amazing...

The Amazing World of M. C. Escher, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern Two), 73 Belford Road, Edinburgh, EH4 3DS, www.nationalgalleries.org, 0131 624 6200. From today until 27th September 2015 (£9/7)