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ESCHER BLOG
M.C. Escher: An Intuitive Visionary Artist
In the twentieth century, when art and science alike were reimagining the concept of reality, M.C. Escher emerged as a visionary artist without any attachment to mysticism, drugs, or tradition. His visions were inward, rigorous, and quietly radical. Using woodblock printing and lithography, Escher pursued a sustained inquiry into infinity, interconnections, and the ambiguity of perceptual boundaries. Escher’s audience was balanced between analytical scientists and creative explorers. Mostly known through reproductions, today his original prints are among the great rarities of the art world.
Visionary art, broadly understood, seeks to give form to realities that feel larger than the individual self: infinite extension, recursive structure, and the sense that opposites – self and world, figure and ground, order and chaos – are not truly separate. Each is part of the other.
Escher’s “Boats and Fish” woodcut is a deep visual meditation of unity within duality. Sea and sky interpenetrate. The forms do not merely coexist, they generate one another. Each figure gains form from its participation in a larger pattern. Each thing is part of everything around it.
Escher’s lithograph “Order and Chaos” illustrates the duality of our perception of the world. All around us we see fragments of daily life: crumpled paper, some cast-off string, a pipe with a broken bowl. All these things reflect in the center orb. Within everything there exists perfect atoms and crystalline forms.
Oh, if only we had eyes that could see that perfection!
M.C. Escher was a visionary not because he escaped reality, but because he took delight in finding its patterns and playing with its mysteries. His prints do not ask the viewer to abandon reason: they ask us to follow perception to its furthest edge. In doing so, Escher offers an intuitively understandable and profound glimpse of both the world around us as well as a view towards the infinite. His is a cosmos in which every boundary is provisional and every object creates the space beyond its edges. The act of seeing Escher’s art guides us through the limitless doorway leading to imagination.
Through line, pattern, and paradox, Escher demonstrates that visionary insight need not depend on altered chemistry nor mystical insight. It can arise from sustained attention to the deep structures that underlie both our consciousness and the world around us.
Viewing Escher’s art reveals the connections between all things and provides us with a glimpse of things beyond our perception.
Jeffrey Price
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Concerning Escher's Emblemata Proofs
This signed tissue-paper proof of M. C. Escher’s “Frogs in the Lilypond by Moonlight“ Emblemata is from an unrecorded, unique, and previously unknown collection of proofs, formerly in the possession of the art historian G. J. Hoogewerff (1884 – 1963), the author and initiator of the Emblemata suite and publication undertaken tin collaboration with M. C. Escher.
Twelve plates from the ‘XXIV Emblemata, possibly including this example, were also the first exhibited works of Escher in a museum, from February to March of 1932.
Hoogewerff played a crucial role in the personal artistic life of M. C. Escher. Escher lived and worked in Rome between 1924 and 1935, and Hoogewerff was the director of the Dutch Historical Institute in Rome from 1924 to 1950. Around 1930 Escher became quite depressed, struggling with health problems, lack of inspiration, lack of interest in work and financial difficulties, all of which led him to contemplate ending his artistic career altogether. Hoogewerff revitalized Escher with the suggestion of a partnership production of a collection of ‘emblemata,’ being allegorical illustrations with an accompanying explanatory text, captions by a Latin motto. Thus using a traditional form and at the same time creating something new, Hoogewerff wrote the text under the pseudonym of A. E. Drijfhout and Escher created woodcuts of his images incorporating the text.
Hoogewerff also played a significant role in Escher’s recognition as a graphic artist. He was the first well-known art historian to write a lengthy eighteen-page article on Escher’s work, published in the leading Dutch artistic literary journal ‘Elseviers Geillustreerd Maandschrift’ in October, 1931. In it he also favorably discusses the Emblemata. A few months later, in February 1932, possibly through connection of Hoogewerff, Escher had his first museum exhibition in the “Haages Gemeente Museum.” There he exhibited his graphic work for the first time, including woodcuts from the Emblemata, in the exhibition “Moderne Nederlandsche Houtsneden.”
The printed book created with Escher’s woodcuts was finally published nearly half a year later in the summer of 1932 by C. A. J. van Dishoeck in Bussum. The total edition of the book was 300 examples, of which 25 examples contained the woodcuts signed in pencil with initials only. All copies of the published edition, including the 25 ‘special’ copies, were printed on beige Van Gelder Similie-Japan paper.
It is believed that Escher created two sets of proof prints, hand-rubbed woodcuts printed on thin Japan tissue, some of which he signed with his full name while other proofs were unsigned. Escher’s personal set of proofs was bequeathed to Holland’s State Museum, and one set was presented to Hoogewerff and retained by him for the rest of his life. Following Hoogewerff’s death his Emblemata proofs passed into private hands with a portion of the proofs later acquired by Artists’ Market in 2020. This proof print of “Frogs in the Lilypond by Moonlight” was framed by Artists’ Market in a hand-crafted black cherry frame with 22-karat gold leaf banding to museum standards of conservation.
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