Prying Dutchman

Maurits Escher is one of Europe's most original graphic artists, and an extremely skilled one, but his talent has not brought him much fame. At 52, he lives a pinched life with his family in the town of Baarn (pop. 15,000), two miles from Queen Juliana's Soestdijk Palace. He works hunched over a table by an upstairs window, making woodcuts and lithographs that sell badly. Escher seldom has a chance to show his prints, but last week the Baarn High School had 30 of them on display.

The reaction to the show was slight, as Escher has learned to expect. "It's interesting," people said, "but is it art?" His pictures are unbeautiful, tricky and cold. What makes them interesting is the fact that they are products of an adventurous mind. Escher pries deep into problems of perspective and design, turns up totally new ways of picturing things.

Tight Fit. As a youth, Escher knocked about Europe making prints that were ordinary enough to be used for tourist ads. The abstract mosaics of Spain's Alhambra changed his bent. Fascinated by the mosaics' flat, tight geometry, he set himself the task of making equally tight, equally geometrical and yet representational pictures. That meant fitting recognizable shapes together as neatly as tiles and alternating them to create flat patterns. Compared to some of the problems he has since set himself, it was easy.

The next step for Escher was to use such patterns merely as backgrounds for three-dimensional pictures. He learned to show nudes, lizards and hands looming out of the flat surface and blending back into it. The stunt points up one of Escher's chief concerns, the illusory nature of all art. "It is a very superficial picture which man creates for himself," Escher says. "Only in our thoughts do we try to animate the flatness of our images with depth. Suddenly it can become clear to us how silly we are, we maniacs of the flat image, with our unceasing craving for unreachable depth."

Escher's Other World shows an even stranger craving, the desire to see in three directions at once. The three corner windows in the picture are repetitions of the same window looking out toward the horizon, down toward the ground and up into the night sky.

Wild Punch. His Balcony Escher describes as "a sort of self-mockery. I chose a town built on a hill so that in the sketch there emerged a powerful plastic suggestion by the perspective view of the blocks of houses. [Then I punched] the back of the paper. Now you can see the protruding tumor, and you see that these houses and sun were nonsense. But I, poor fool, what did I do? This wild effort to depict in appearance the reality seems also to have been illusion, for . . . the paper is as flat and smooth as before, and I succeeded only in the suggestion of a suggestion."

Actually, all Escher's prints are suggestions of suggestions. Done in a hard mechanical style, they intrigue the eye and mind without coming anywhere near the heart. "My works," he cheerfully admits, "are never successful. The idea you start with mentally is very fine, but as soon as you try to put it plastically, it's ruined. That's why you always begin again." Escher's brilliantly conceived beginnings may not be art in any strict sense of the word, but they may quite possibly broaden art's horizons.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.