The Twisted Reality of M.C. Escher

Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898 –1972) was a graphic artist whose mathematically-inspired prints have been insanely popular for decades.I have always found his work technically perfect, and driven by a warped sense of reality - at least what he chooses to show his viewers. His mind-bending compositions are so complex, but they let us defy the gravity of our existence to go crawl around in his. Let's take a look at this topsy-turvy master printmaker.

Born in Leeuwarden, Friesland, his family moved to Arnhem in 1903, where he attended school until 1918. He was a sickly child, and was placed in a special school at the age of seven. In 1918, he went to the Technical College of Delft. From 1919 to 1922, he attended the Haarlem School of Architecture and Decorative Arts; briefly studied architecture, but settled on studying decorative arts.

In 1922, Escher traveled through Italy and Spain. He was impressed by the Moorish architecture with its intricate designs, especially those found at the fourteenth-century Alhambra. Its designs had geometrical symmetries featuring interlocking repetitive patterns in the colored tiles, and sculpted into the walls and ceilings. This experience infused Escher’s interest in mathematics and tessellation.

The sketches he made of the Alhambra and the Mezquita, the Moorish mosque of Cordoba, had a career-long influence upon his work with geometric forms, unusual perspective, and multiple points of view.He lived in Rome from 1923 to 1935, where he met and married Jetta Umiker. The couple settled in Rome and raised three sons. In 1935, the political climate in Italy became unacceptable to Escher. World War II forced him to move in 1941, to the Netherlands, where he lived until 1970. Most of his best-known works date from this period.

In July 1969 he finished his last work, called Snakes, in which snakes wind through a pattern of linked rings. These shrink to infinity toward both the center and the edge of a circle. The image exhibits Escher's love of symmetry, interlocking patterns, and his approach to death. In 1970, Escher moved to an artists' retirement home and maintained his own studio until his death in 1972. He is buried at the New Cemetery in Baarn.

Escher's work is mathematical and considered cerebral. Escher is not the first artist to explore mathematical themes: Parmigianino, William Hogarth, and Giovanni Battista Piranesi also experimented with mathematics in their work. Cubism and Surrealism had affinity with Escher’s work, but he did not embrace their movements.

In his early years, Escher sketched landscapes and nature. His early love of landscapes and nature created an interest in tessellation, which he called Regular Division of the Plane; this became the title of his 1958 book, where he described the systematic buildup of mathematical designs in his artworks. He began to explore the properties and possibilities of tessellation using geometric grids as the basis for his sketches. Although he did not have mathematical training—his understanding of mathematics was largely visual and intuitive.

Escher worked primarily in the printmaking media. In his graphic art, he portrayed mathematical relationships among shapes, figures and space. He was a "thinking artist" like Piero della Francesca, Leonardo da Vinci, and Albrecht Dürer. He often incorporated three-dimensional objects such as the Platonic solids such as spheres, tetrahedons and cubes into his works, as well as mathematical objects like cylinders and stellated polyhedra. Escher's artwork is especially well liked by mathematicians and scientists, who enjoy his use of polyhedra and geometric distortions.

Mathematicians have identified 11 strands of mathematical and scientific research inspired by Escher. His works have appeared on album and book covers, posters, clothing, and jigsaw puzzles . Both Austria and the Netherlands have issued postage stamps commemorating the artist and his works.


The asteroid 4444 Escher was named in his honor, in 1985.

He was awarded the Knighthood of the Order of Orange-Nassau in 1955. The M.C. Escher Company controls the artist’s intellectual property.

Public Collections
Escher Museum in The Hague
Huis ten Bosch, Japan
Israel Museum
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
National Gallery of Canada

In a World of His Own: The Prints of Peter Milton

There are not many printmakers in the United States who make it on their own - that is, who earn their livelihood solely by making prints... At age thirty-nine Peter Milton made the decision to devote his entire energies to printmaking. Today he is considered the most successful of contemporary artists.

Kneeland McNulty

Peter Winslow Milton. American, b. 1930-
Milton's mesmerizing world of invented reality and mind-bending perspectives present a richly detailed view of society that is at once contemporary as much as it is a world of the past. Leisurely times spent playing pool in the parlour, and sitting in the sun room of some palatial salon sipping tea while watching fish swim above one's heads as though we are in an aquarium are only some of Milton's twisted images of reality.

The period Milton references harkens back to the Victorian and Industrial Age. We see old automobiles, and large, airy interiors of grand homes, with children playing in enormous expanses alongside of a painter at his easel; with his faithful dog curled up at his feet. The complexity of Milton's fantastical images, combines several types of spaces, interiors and overlapping spaces into one gigantic place of one's dreams. The artistic references present in Milton's work also intrigue us and make us feel as though we are a part of Milton's dreamscapes.

Stages for the ballet behind private viewing boxes for the opera, intermittent with genteel folk and the commoner are make us feel as though we seeing a performance onstage and off. The gathering of people for the ballet have a similar feel as the lively patrons of a Toulouse Lautrec cabaret.

Milton’s imagery frequently draws on elements from the late 19th and early 20th century English and French literary world. He manages not only capture the mood of another era but also mid-century cinema. Bergman and Fellini are among his major artistic influences.

The artist's compositional similarities to a Caillebotte painting, or one of Milton's interior/exteriors remind one of the perception-twisted environs of an M.C. Escher print, or the flip of being within and outside a structure like we see in his lonely staircases with gaslight parks and the glassed-in dome of a train station or a conservatory. These are complex pictures and we revel in the artist's pain-staking details.

Milton has received numerous awards for his work, and has a published book titled Peter Milton: Complete Prints 1960-1996. This is a person worthy of the print medium and pushes it with every technical and cultural/artistic influence he can muster. Let us salute one of our modern masters and pray let us look forward to more from his unique world.....

Education
1954 B.F.A. Yale University, New Haven, CT
1961 M.F.A Yale University, New Haven, CT
Work In Public Collections
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY
Arnot Art Museum, Elmira, NY
Ashville Museum of Art, NC
Baltimore Museum of ART, MD
Banco de la Republica, Bogotá, Columbia
Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, France
Boston Public Library, MA
British Museum, London, England
Brooklyn Museum, NY
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA
Cincinnati Art Museum, OH
Cleveland Museum of Art, OH
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Detroit Institute of Arts, MI
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, CA
Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
George Washington University, Washington, DC
Harn Museum of Art, Gainesville, FL
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC
Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH
Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Rochester
Library of Congress, Washington, DC
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA
Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC
Museo de Arte Moderno, Bogotá, Columbia
Museo de Arte Moderno "La Tertulla", Cali, Columbia
Museum of American Art, Washington DC
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
Museum of Modern Art, NYC
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
New Britain Museum of American Art, CT
New Jersey State Museum, Trenton
New York Times
Newark Public Library, NJ
Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA
Phillips Collection, Washington, DC
Portland Art Museum, OR
Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, Providence, RI
Rutgers University, The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick
Seattle Art Museum, WA
Society of American Graphic Artists, Inc., NYC
Stanford University, Cantor Center for Visual Arts, MN
Tate Gallery, London, England
Yale University, New Haven, CT