This turned out to be the last of his long study journeys after 1937, his artworks were created in his studio rather than in the field. He also studied the architecture of the Mezquita, the Moorish mosque of Cordoba. The sketches he made in the Alhambra formed a major source for his work from that time on. It remains an extremely absorbing activity, a real mania to which I have become addicted, and from which I sometimes find it hard to tear myself away. It was here that he became fascinated, to the point of obsession, with tessellation, explaining: In May and June 1936, Escher travelled back to Spain, revisiting the Alhambra and spending days at a time making detailed drawings of its mosaic patterns. The townscapes and landscapes of these places feature prominently in his artworks. He travelled frequently, visiting (among other places) Viterbo in 1926, the Abruzzi in 19, Corsica in 19, Calabria in 1930, the Amalfi coast in 19, and Gargano and Sicily in 19.
Escher and Jetta later had two more sons – Arthur and Jan. The couple settled in Rome where their first son, Giorgio (George) Arnaldo Escher, named after his grandfather, was born. While in Italy, Escher met Jetta Umiker – a Swiss woman, like himself attracted to Italy – whom he married in 1924. Study journeysĮscher's painstaking study of the same Moorish tiling in the Alhambra, 1936, demonstrates his growing interest in tessellation.Įscher returned to Italy and lived in Rome from 1923 to 1935. He briefly studied architecture, but he failed a number of subjects (due partly to a persistent skin infection) and switched to decorative arts, studying under the graphic artist Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita. From 1919 to 1922, Escher attended the Haarlem School of Architecture and Decorative Arts, learning drawing and the art of making woodcuts.
In 1918, he went to the Technical College of Delft. He took carpentry and piano lessons until he was thirteen years old. Although he excelled at drawing, his grades were generally poor. Known to his friends and family as "Mauk", he was a sickly child and was placed in a special school at the age of seven he failed the second grade. In 1903, the family moved to Arnhem, where he attended primary and secondary school until 1918. He was the youngest son of the civil engineer George Arnold Escher and his second wife, Sara Gleichman. Maurits Cornelis Escher was born on 17 June 1898 in Leeuwarden, Friesland, the Netherlands, in a house that forms part of the Princessehof Ceramics Museum today. He was one of the major inspirations of Douglas Hofstadter's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach.Įscher's birth house, now part of the Princessehof Ceramics Museum, in Leeuwarden, Friesland, the Netherlands Apart from being used in a variety of technical papers, his work has appeared on the covers of many books and albums. He traveled in Italy and Spain, sketching buildings, townscapes, architecture and the tilings of the Alhambra and the Mezquita of Cordoba, and became steadily more interested in their mathematical structure.Įscher's art became well known among scientists and mathematicians, and in popular culture, especially after it was featured by Martin Gardner in his April 1966 Mathematical Games column in Scientific American. Although Escher believed he had no mathematical ability, he interacted with the mathematicians George Pólya, Roger Penrose, Harold Coxeter and crystallographer Friedrich Haag, and conducted his own research into tessellation.Įarly in his career, he drew inspiration from nature, making studies of insects, landscapes, and plants such as lichens, all of which he used as details in his artworks.
His work features mathematical objects and operations including impossible objects, explorations of infinity, reflection, symmetry, perspective, truncated and stellated polyhedra, hyperbolic geometry, and tessellations. In the late twentieth century, he became more widely appreciated, and in the twenty-first century he has been celebrated in exhibitions around the world. He was 70 before a retrospective exhibition was held. Maurits Cornelis Escher ( Dutch pronunciation: 17 June 1898 – 27 March 1972) was a Dutch graphic artist who made mathematically inspired woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints.ĭespite wide popular interest, Escher was for most of his life neglected in the art world, even in his native Netherlands. Knight (1955) and Officer (1967) of the Order of Orange-Nassau
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