Today's Honorary Subscriber is the Dutch graphic artist Maurits Corneille Escher (1898-1972), whose print-work became popular in the mid-20th century for its distinctive combination of realistic detail with bizarre optical and conceptual effects. He created eye-catching images by employing conflicting perspectives, repetitive interlocking figures, and spatial puzzles depicting impossible architectural constructions such as continuous waterfalls and endless staircases. Their perceptual and geometric complexity made his creations particularly interesting to cognitive psychologists and mathematicians. And the popularity of Escher's work with the general public was manifested by the mass reproduction of his images on coffee mugs, T-shirts, postcards and wall posters. The Dungeons & Dragons game is thought to have borrowed some of its design features from Escher's drawing style.
Escher was born in Leeuwarden, Netherlands. He attended both elementary and secondary school in Arnhem between 1912 and 1918. In 1920, he enrolled at the School for Architecture and Decorative Arts at Haarlem, where he learned woodcutting and made many sketches of landscapes and the plants and insects, which would appear in his later graphics work. In 1924 he married Jetta Umiker, and they made their home in Frascati, just outside Rome. The couple had three children, and the family traveled extensively through France, Italy, and Spain, during which time Escher sketched subjects suitable for his woodcuts and lithographs. His first art works were realistic portrayals of landscape and architecture. Escher then began using unusual perspectives in his treatment of landscape and natural forms, and by 1937 he had adopted a printmaker style that combined a meticulous realism with paradoxical visual and perspective effects. He became a virtuoso at portraying unexpected metamorphoses of mundane objects, as is evident in his prints Verbum (1942) and Metamorphosis (1939-40). In his lithograph Relativity (1953) Escher created a visual paradox by combining three separate perspectives into a unified, coherent whole.
By 1958 Escher had become famous. He had given the first important exhibition of his works and had also been featured in Time magazine. He began to receive important awards including the Knighthood of the Oranje Nassau, and was regularly commissioned to design art for dignitaries around the world. In 1964, however, he fell ill while delivering a series of lectures in North America. He was forced to cut back on his work, and gradually he turned inward and led a reclusive life. Escher took six months to complete his final graphic work, a woodcut, Snakes, which was unveiled in July 1969 and was notable for a design that moves off to infinity at both the center and the edges of the image. He died March 17, 1972 in Laren, Netherlands. One critic commenting on his life's work has written: "With his amazingly repetitive graphic illustration and unflinchingly control of size, shape, and shading, Escher draws like a human computer. One can only wonder what he might have done with today's graphics."
