The art of the impossible

Mau­rits Cor­nelis Es­cher (1898-1972), or more com­monly M.C. Es­cher, is an artist whose name is lit­tle known to the gen­eral pub­lic. Yet his work is to be found every­where, from movies to comics, video games, com­mer­cials, clothes and posters. Stairs lead­ing nowhere, lizards in star-shaped cages and self-draw­ing hands are still very pop­u­lar im­ages half a cen­tury after his death.

Until Sep­tem­ber, over 200 Es­cher en­grav­ings are on dis­play in Les Dras­sanes, the Royal Ship­yards of Barcelona and home of the Mar­itime Mu­seum, thanks to an agree­ment be­tween the Barcelona city and provin­cial coun­cils and the Ital­ian com­pany, Arthemisia-Evolu­cionarte, a spe­cial­ist in or­gan­is­ing ex­hi­bi­tions around the world. The Es­cher pro­ject is one of its most re­cent suc­cesses and it comes to the Cata­lan cap­i­tal after hav­ing al­ready toured a dozen cities.

At a time of so much hard­ship for local gal­leries, the de­ci­sion to bring this fran­chised cul­tural prod­uct to Barcelona has caused con­tro­versy. Yet local politi­cians see it as an op­por­tu­nity to re­vi­talise the lower part of the Ram­bla, es­pe­cially with the re­turn of tourists in the off­ing. “We haven’t come to take any­thing away from the mu­se­ums here but to add a qual­ity prod­uct,” Jesús Rodríguez, the di­rec­tor of Arthemisia-Evolu­cionarte in Spain, said in the ex­hi­bi­tion’s pre­sen­ta­tion last month.

The Es­cher ex­hi­bi­tion is the first in a three-year agree­ment, dur­ing which other big names in the world of art will also make an ap­pear­ance, most likely Cha­gall and Monet. Cost­ing 13 euros, this ex­hi­bi­tion is a com­plete ret­ro­spec­tive that is nour­ished by the col­lec­tion of Fed­erico Giu­dice­an­drea, who is also the cu­ra­tor. It has taken Giu­dice­an­drea decades to col­lect his Es­cher en­grav­ings, which are to be found in only a few hands and which can be worth up to 200,000 euros. He says his first Es­cher cost him 50 euros, but “this col­lec­tion is worth mil­lions today.”

Es­cher did not ex­pe­ri­ence suc­cess until the end of his life, al­though the cu­ra­tor ex­plains that “he did not need to live on his art. His wealthy fam­ily kept him.” Es­cher was Dutch, but he found his in­spi­ra­tion in Italy, where he lived for 13 years, until Mus­solini’s rise. “The day his son was forced to wear fas­cist cloth­ing, he packed his bags and went to Switzer­land,” says the cu­ra­tor.

The other coun­try that fas­ci­nated him was Spain, and the Al­ham­bra in Granada amazed him. He made two trips there, and the his­toric site’s fa­mous tes­sel­la­tions would be­come a sur­real ver­sion of arabesque geo­met­ric or­na­men­ta­tion.

Es­cher is often as­so­ci­ated with the Sur­re­al­ists, but the truth is that he stood apart and was more of a soli­tary in­tro­vert. He was largely mis­un­der­stood by the art world due to his ob­ses­sion with the laws of sci­ence. Yet that is also why he was loved most by math­e­mati­cians. The ex­hi­bi­tion or­gan­ised for him at a math­e­mati­cians’ con­gress was the be­gin­ning of es­cher­ma­nia.

“Then the hip­pie move­ment took over, and they made psy­che­delic posters of his de­signs,” says Giu­dice­an­drea. How­ever, their adding colour to his en­grav­ings was some­thing that made Es­cher very angry. Mu­si­cians of the time, such as Pink Floyd, also began to use his im­ages for their album cov­ers. How­ever, the only one who had the cour­tesy to ask for per­mis­sion was Mick Jag­ger. Es­cher’s re­sponse was a re­sound­ing no. The lead singer of the Rolling Stones wanted to use an en­grav­ing in which a frog is slowly trans­formed into a bird. That en­grav­ing is in this ex­hi­bi­tion, just be­fore the end of the tour, where there is also a large shop full of Es­cher mer­chan­dise.

art ex­hi­bi­tion