The infinite pleasures of Escher: A visual guide 

Editor’s note: Since so many of you love learning about art—or just looking at it—we’re kickstarting a new series of guides—visual essays that introduce you to an artist or even style or school of art. In this one, Aarthi takes us on a ‘trippy’ journey through the great MC Escher’s oeuvre. The mathematical magician—dismissed by art critics and adored by hippies. The post-World War prig who became the unlikely father of psychedelic art.

Written by: Aarthi Ramnath, Assistant news editor

About the lead image: This is a 1952 woodcut titled ‘Puddle’—printed from three blocks.

I came across MC Escher’s ‘mind palace’ on a fine day in The Hague—in a museum called Escher in The Palace. It permanently houses a large collection of his woodcuts and lithographs, along with his most famous optical illusions. That’s when I fell in love. 

Described as “a one-man art movement.” Maurits Cornelis Escher never neatly fit into the art movements of his time—be it Fauvism, Cubism, or even Surrealism. Many art critics do not even consider him an artist—instead a “technically accomplished” graphic designer. He only experienced success in his 50s—as the “godfather of psychedelic art” the hippies, an enduring embarrassment for a straitlaced prude born almost at the dawn of the 20th century (1898).

All of us have encountered Escher whether we know it or not—in a movie, a video game or album art. He remains one of the most influential artists in the world today. But he is also among the least known—a gap I hope this guide will rectify. This is not a definitive essay on Escher’s life and art. There are a number of pieces that accomplish that task very well in the reading list. It is instead a visual essay that I hope will illuminate, delight—and perhaps pique your curiosity to explore the wondrous world of one of my favourite artists. 

A quick origin story: Escher’s background was stolidly middle class. The fifth son of a civil engineer, he was a shy kid who worked as a carpentry apprentice until the age of 13. In school, he failed all subjects in his final exams. But Maurits managed to get into architecture school, and then drifted into graphic design—where he finally found professional success. His personal life was unremarkable—an early marriage, a mostly quiet existence. Escher possessed neither the flamboyance of Salvador Dali or passionate politics of Diego Rivera. 

The first success: When Escher failed his school exams, his father noted in his diary: “the young man consoled himself by drawing and making a linocut of a sunflower.” Fittingly, one of Escher’s early and enduring successes was ‘Drawing Hands’(1948).

A debt to Islamic architecture 

While much has been made of the mathematical genius of Escher, few know of the influence of Islamic architecture—which helped launch the Escher we know today. He travelled extensively in the 1920s—visiting Spain as a student. It was a later visit—in 1934 to the Alhambra Palace—that would prove fateful. Escher would carefully copy the geometric shapes and repetition (see below) that would later become a signature style.  

You can see the influence more clearly in his sketches of the Mezquita Mosque in Cordoba:

Still a student, he developed the first motif inspired by the Islamic tiles in 1922—titled ‘Eight Heads’:

And here are examples of more abstract and colourful versions:

Escher’s circular motifs resembled mandalas:

Escher the mathematician, magician

Escher insisted that his art was merely “illustrations of interesting mathematician concepts”—with no deeper psychological or cultural subtext: 

A magician fascinated by mathematics, which he considered the source of beauty and harmony, Escher studied geometry, topology, logic, fractals, complex numbers, and dimensions. He used mathematics to create surprising visual effects, such as paradoxes, illusions, and infinite shapes.

The greater irony is that he was no good at mathematics:

He had practically no training in mathematics,” Doris Schattschneider, Ph.D, a mathematics professor emerita at Moravian College, tells Popular Mechanics. “There’s no equations at all that he used. He almost failed his mathematics in high school and never went beyond high school. 

In some cases, the influences are painfully obvious—like this one titled simply ‘Mobius Strip I’:

The wood engraving called ‘Concentric Rinds’ would, however, would blow any science geek’s mind:

Four spherical concentric shells are illuminated by a central source of light. Each shell consists of a network of nine large circles which divide the surface of the sphere into 48 similarly shaped spherical triangles.

It looks like this: 

‘Up and Down’—inspired by la Mezquita in Córdoba—is simultaneously a riff on the mathematical concept of infinity: 

A more amusing—and fantastical iteration—is this one titled ‘Reptiles’: 

The celebrated ‘Ascending and Descending’ (1960) shows human figures “trudging forever upwards and eternally downwards respectively, on an impossible four-sided eternal staircase”—which is perhaps among the most recognisable of Escher’s preoccupation with the ‘impossible objects’ set out by mathematician Roger Penrose:

Contradicting his own claims about his ‘mathematical’ works, Escher would write of this painting:

That staircase is a rather sad, pessimistic subject, as well as being very profound and absurd. With similar questions on his lips, our own Albert Camus has just smashed into a tree in his friend’s car and killed himself. An absurd death, which had rather an effect on me. Yes, yes, we climb up and up, we imagine we are ascending; every step is about 10 inches high, terribly tiring — and where does it all get us? Nowhere.

For a more amusing visual pun, take a close and long look at ‘Sphere Spirals’—which will start to revolve in front of your own eyes:

The other side of Escher

Contrary to popular belief, Escher didn’t just produce endlessly repeating, twisty puzzle-like etchings. He first drew intricate landscapes as a young artist in Italy:

He even churned out portraits—like this woodcut of his wife Jetta Umiker in 1925, printed soon after their wedding:

Later iterations—like this self-portrait—were as witty as his other creations. Where great Masters like Jan van Eyck painted themselves in mirrors, Escher preferred glass balls like the ‘Hand with a Reflecting Sphere’:

A sadder piece is ‘Bond of Union’—which reflected a particularly unhappy phase in his marriage. Of the piece, Escher wrote:

Like an endless bond, even their foreheads are woven together, they form an inseparable entity. Whether these two are glad to be bound as a family together, I cannot tell. It is a perilous undertaking, and they look a little sad.

The unlikely legacy of Escher 

As we mentioned before, Escher ‘peaked’, so to speak, in the 60s—when he was discovered by hippies. He became an unwitting—and unwilling—pioneer of psychedelic art. You can see why in this ‘trippy’ animation of one of his drawings:

As Forbes puts it: “Escher’s art was as unpretentiously mind-bending as LSD.”

The grumpy old artist: Escher often complained about  the ‘appropriation’ of his art—scolding those who tried. Example: Mick Jagger:

When Mick Jagger wrote a letter to Maurits Cornelis Escher asking to use his artwork on a Rolling Stones LP, the rock star’s request was answered with a brusque lesson in etiquette. “Please tell Mr. Jagger I am not Maurits to him,” Escher instructed Mick’s assistant.

He was mortified when a catalogue for a California “Free University” printed “three reproductions of my prints alternating with photographs of seductive naked girls.”

Graduating to the movies: Unfortunately for the great man, the ‘trippy’ quality of Escher’s art has proved to be irresistible for successive generations. For example: his ‘impossible staircase’—which was reproduced in the 1986 film ‘Labyrinth’:

This scene in ‘Inception’ is as obvious as it gets: 

The most recent cinematic version—in 2021—was this fabulous scene in ‘Squid Game’:

A parting treat: Movies are nice but the true inheritor of Escher’s legacy is the dazzling video game Monument Valley (which we highly recommend):

Reading list: The Guardian and BBC News have good artist profiles on Escher. Grapheine about more on his influences and inspirations. Fast Company offers four fun facts, while this article has all the nerdy deets on the Escher-inspired video game. Illustration History looks at the hidden emotions in his artwork.  Popular Mechanics has a fascinating account on Escher’s tryst with maths, while Architectural Digest constructs his relationship with architecture. Last but not least, this Forbes piece has more on why Hippies were drawn to his art. If you need more, you can always go down the rabbit hole of all his work on this museum site.