n-Dimensional Reality

In his time, the Dutch artist Maurits Cornelis Escher seemed a cultural anomaly. He loathed modern art--"I consider 60% of the artists nuts and fakes," he said of Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum--and was duly ignored by it. For most of his working life, critics dismissed him as a pedantic illustrator. Born in 1898, Escher was 52 before his tightly executed woodcuts, lithographs and engravings began to attract even a crumb of attention. A retiring, ironic man with the bony nose and goat beard of an El Greco prelate, Escher took no part in art debates, lived quietly in a village outside Amsterdam, and made few claims for his work. It was improvisation, he insisted: his prints contained nothing that they did not openly state. "Do I have to say that none of these fantasies have any pretension to profoundness? I regard them only as the results of a fascinating play of thoughts."

Vivid Warning. Yet when Maurits Escher died last month, aged 73, a cult had begun to gather round him. Through many channels, from head-shop posters to science magazines, Escher had been insinuated into world currency. A lavish book, The Complete World of M.C. Escher, will shortly be published by Abrams. This week an almost complete exhibition of his graphics opens at the Vorpal Gallery in San Francisco, where the prints Escher sold for $ 17 to $40 two decades ago are being offered at $2,000 to $ 15,000.

The question is: Why? Considered as a formal artist, Escher was virtually negligible. His use of color was dull and his drawing had a serviceably vulgar look: the way Escher described the human figure, for instance, made Norman Rockwell look like Giorgione. Much of his architectural imagery is supermarket Piranesi.

But Escher's asset was an intricately schematic intelligence, and this he used with such wit and patience that he became, without modern rival, a master of visual paradox. A great many of Escher's prints were about teasingly blocked situations. They are scientific demonstrations of how to visualize the impossible. What they propose is a kind of n-dimensional reality in which the laws of perception are temporarily repealed. The most innocent images contain excruciating traps.

One example is Escher's Waterfall (1961). A water mill with columns that carry the mill stream above the wheel? Not quite. On close examination, the building is incredible. The water is flowing uphill. The columns and the millrace could never be built: they are contradictory. So Escher's water mill, turning in perpetual motion through a kind of dimensional warp, becomes a vivid warning that art is not reality.

Escher's work was involved with many of the notions current in the more abstract sciences. The obsessive patternmaking, which appeared after he saw the Moorish tilework in the Alhambra during a visit to Spain in 1932, became a visual demonstration of field theory --for there is no "foreground" or "background" in Escher's mosaics. The outline of one figure instantly becomes the boundary of another.

Escher knew that his work was based on paradox. "The problem itself," he said, "is a question without an answer. Why has man, from prehistoric times until today, allowed himself to be so influenced by his own suggestions of space which he depicts on a flat plane that he forgets that they are illusions?" No question about representation is more profound, and Escher's pursuit of it secures him a small place in the history of perception. "Robert Hughes

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