"I fear that there is only one person in the world who could make a really good film about my prints: myself," Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972) wrote to an American collector in 1969. This quote is the starting point and the main inspiration for the film "Escher: Journey Into Infinity" (2018), narrated by Stephen Fry and directed by Robin Lutz.
The film is part of the 2020 edition of the Architecture & Design Film Festival (ADFF: 2020). Due to Coronavirus the festival was rescheduled online: viewers across the U.S. and Canada can now buy tickets and watch the 17 films part of the virtual programme until December 3.
The programme features a wide range of films, some more focused on architecture, others on design, urbanization, and the role of women in the industry (tickets for individual films and all-access passes are on sale at this link). "Escher: Journey Into Infinity" is dedicated to all fans of art, graphic design and mathematics as well.
Stephen Fry guides us through Escher's life and experiences by reading about his passions, fears, work and inspirations (Escher's sons George, 92, and Jan, 80, also appear reminiscing about their parents) from letters, diaries, lectures and catalogs in which he described his thoughts and observations.
Escher was born in 1898, in Leeuwarden, The Netherlands, the son of a wealthy family. As a child, he was in poor health and spent many months away from his family in a children's boarding house by the sea. He often said he hated going to school, but loved the drawing class.
To make his parents happy, he went to the School for Architecture and Decorative Arts in Haarlem. Graphic techniques teacher Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita, saw something in the graphic work of his new student, who left the engineering department to become a graphic artist.
In the '20s Escher travelled to Italy where he met his wife, Jetta, and where he was fascinated by the Tuscan landscape, by nature and the complicated beauty of plants. Supported financially by Escher's parents, they settled in Rome where two of his sons were born. After Mussolini's rise to power, Escher left Italy with his family. They relocated to Switzerland, but Escher hated snow, "I hate that white shroud that covers the earth," he states in the film.
To escape the snow, Escher and Jetta made a sea voyage around the Mediterranean in 1936. In Spain, they visited the Alhambra in Granada, where they drew the geometric tessellations that fascinated and inspired him. Escher was struck by the tiles of the Alhambra and the motifs and geometrical figures distributed according to a system. It was then that Escher started systematising and thinking about recreating the figures using motifs borrowed from nature, such as birds, fish and bees. These first experiments eventually led to Escher's tessellations (from the Latin "tessella", small square stones or tiles used in ancient Roman mosaics), regular divisions of the plane that created an endless effect, like his famous prints "Day and Night" and "Metamorphose", or his circular tessellations.
Gradually, Escher's work became a reflection of his inner world and of his ideas, images inspired by landscape and nature that, on closer inspection, revealed themselves as impossible and very much influenced by mathematical rather than artistic principles and based on a sort of association mania (he would think about geometry and the hexagon, then about the honeycomb, and therefore about bees).
In 1941 the family moved to Baarn and during the war years Escher worked in silence. When he heard that architects who were members of their union would be accommodated in the guilds, even if they did not want to, he immediately cancelled his membership of Pulchri Studio and of the Graphic Association. He refused to work with the Germans and was deeply affected by the deportation in 1944 of his beloved teacher Jessurun de Mesquita. He kept a work by Jessurun that he found on the floor of his ruined studio, trampled down and with the print of a German soldier's boot on it, throughout his life.
After the Second World War, Escher's fame grew: he became increasingly popular and was amazed at the fact that illegal copies of his prints, reinvented in fluorescent colours, were sold in the US in the '60, becoming a hit with young people and with hippies in particular. Artists and musicians got in touch with him, among them Mick Jagger who hoped to be able to use his prints on an album cover.
His definitive breakthrough in the Dutch art world came in 1968 thanks to a major retrospective exhibition at the Municipal Museum in The Hague. He died in March 1972, and, in 2018 the Fries Museum in Leeuwarden dedicated to him the exhibition "Escher's Journey".
Escher visualised his words and thoughts, allowing them to become real in his drawings and sketches, woodcuts and wood engravings. The figure of artist that comes out of this movie is fascinating: Escher was passionate, but also obsessed about his work and in the film we often see him working constantly, fanatically and tirelessly. His paradoxical worlds take new meanings when they are animated in the film, something that allows viewers to consider the beauty of infinite worlds within the limited spaces of his artworks.
Suspended between art and mathematics, M.C. Escher turned throughout the years into a constant inspiration, appearing in comics, adverts, films, tattoos and even in dance performances, proving that his works, these depictions of extraordinarily paradoxical and dynamic universes in constant movement, are genuinely timeless visions that will keep on being appreciated by generations to come. Indeed, as Graham Nash (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young) states in the film, Escher's works "will transcend into the future brilliantly, the crazier this place gets, the noisier this place gets, the more his work is really interesting."
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