Vorpal Gallery Popularizes Escher's Work.

VORPAL GALLERY OPENING DAY

Vorpal Gallery: The Counter-Culture Haven That Became Escher’s American Stage

Tucked away in an alley beside City Lights Bookshop—epicenter of the counter-culture generation and a crucible of the countercultural energy—there emerged in 1962 a gallery that by the late 60’s would dramatically reshape the American art world’s relationship with one of the 20th century’s most enigmatic visionaries: M.C. Escher. The gallery was Vorpal, a nonsense word taken from the Alice in Wonderland poem Jabberwocky, and its founder, the multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker Muldoon Elder, was an alchemist of culture who fused the worlds of literature, music, visual art, and psychedelia into a singular, unforgettable institution.

A Serendipitous Start Beside the Beats

The first incarnation of Vorpal Gallery was modest, nestled in a North Beach alley next to the legendary City Lights Bookshop, a haven for poets like Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. In mid-1965, Elder moved the Vorpal Gallery to an unlikely but electric setting of a large abandoned warehouse close to the Bay waterfront on 1168 Battery Street where Elder planted the seed of what would become the most influential platform for Escher's art in America. As the 1960s waned and the psychedelic revolution peaked, Vorpal stood as a curious portal— between the literati and the surreal, between the cosmic and the mathematical.

1970: Escher Takes the Stage in San Francisco1965 The turning point came in 1970, when Muldoon Elder mounted the first major American exhibition of M.C. Escher’s original graphics. This wasn’t merely a gallery opening—it was a cultural event as the waiting crowd flooded into Vorpal’s new, larger space.

1972: By the Vorpal’s next even larger Escher Exhibition in 1972 it became necessary to establish an anti-packed-sardine condition by only allowing one hundred viewers in the gallery at a time but Joan Baez had promised Muldoon that she would sing to the waiting line until everyone waiting had been allowed entry to view the exhibition. Crowds wrapped around the block, buzzing with anticipation as Joan Baez, embodying the San Francisco spirit, serenaded the entire five block long entry line .

On that day, the worlds of rock, academia, and art collided in a kaleidoscope of geometry and wonder.

Although Escher’s work had earlier American champions—including Paul Schuster in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Whyte and Mickelson’s Galleries in Washington D.C.—Vorpal, having already worked directly with Escher for four years, gave Escher’s art the stage it needed to ignite the public imagination. The timing was perfect: the mind-expanding visuals of Escher’s tessellations, impossible architectures, and recursive stairways resonated with a generation already journeying inward and outward through psychedelia and the space race.

Rock Stars, Mathematicians, and the Strong Appeal of Escher

At Vorpal, the crowds weren’t your typical gallery-goers. John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin, Graham Nash of Crosby, Stills & Nash, and Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records,were early Vorpal Gallery patrons. Professors stood shoulder to shoulder with rock stars, each enthralled by the precise madness of Escher’s imagery. Whether drawn by visual paradox, mathematical beauty, or sheer surrealism, visitors found something magnetic in the Dutch draftsman’s work. Vorpal was where those disparate fascinations converged.

Vorpal Expands: Chicago, New York, Laguna Beach

Fueled by the momentum of its Escher exhibitions, Vorpal grew into a national presence, opening galleries in Chicago, New York, and Laguna Beach. But even as it expanded geographically, it retained its original character—intellectually curious, artistically daring, and profoundly idiosyncratic.

Muldoon Elder, ever the renaissance man, infused the galleries with his own eclecticism. A filmmaker, writer, and visual artist, he was less a traditional gallerist than a kind of cultural conjurer. He understood that Escher’s art, with its infinite loops and impossible spaces, spoke not just to collectors, but to seekers. And Vorpal became their meeting ground.