MC Escher’s illusions of perspective

Everyone will have seen a few of MC Escher’s complex visual puzzles, but few are familiar with the artist’s broader trajectory.

MC Escher's Libellula (Dragonfly) (March 1936). © The MC Escher Company, the Netherlands.

There is a famous lithograph made in 1961 by MC Escher (1898-1972) in which water appears to flow away from us along a channel that from our point of view appears level — and must logically be sloping slightly downwards — but which simultaneously seems to climb two storeys through a complex architectural structure before falling back to its original level, powering a waterwheel, and then repeating the same course.

The illusion is based on a geometrical puzzle known as the Penrose tribar, from the name of the mathematician whose researches were inspired by Escher’s work. The tribar is a triangle in which each of the inner angles is 90 degrees, which means that its sides can never meet in two-dimensional space, but can appear to join up if seen in the right perspective.

Escher’s print, incorporating two superimposed tribars camouflaged by architectural detail, has fascinated and puzzled viewers for more than half a century, and reminds one of those Zen paradoxes, or koan, the most famous of which is the question about the sound of one hand clapping, and which were intended to bring reason to its knees and open the mind to awareness beyond the rational.

Readers may like to look up “Escher’s waterfall” on YouTube and discover a reconstruction of the design as an ostensibly perpetual motion machine, made by a student of the Fachhochschule of Trier in Germany, who signs himself McWolles. There is also a second explanatory clip on how the illusion was produced.

Escher’s Drawing hands (January 1948) © The MC Escher Company, the Netherlands.

But returning to Escher, everyone will have seen a few of his complex visual puzzles, perhaps as posters in a friend’s house or on a common room wall at university, but few are familiar with the artist’s broader trajectory. In fact, although Escher’s work has appealed to mathematicians and countercultural types alike for decades, it did not fit into the art fashions of its time and thus tended to be treated as a marginal phenomenon. This exhibition, certainly for the first time in Australia, presents Escher as an artist and allows us to understand his aesthetic as well as his intellectual development.

The well-known puzzle pictures could not have been realised without an exceptional level of graphic ability, so it is not surprising to find that Escher demonstrated remarkable talent from a very early age. He was born into a prosperous Dutch family in 1898 and was encouraged by his father in his studies of art. There is a fine drawing of his father done in his youth, and then a quite extraordinary pencil portrait — intended for lithographic reproduction — of his father in his 90s but acutely alert, reading with a magnifying glass.

One of the earliest works, though minor in itself, is significant both in its meaning and its medium. It is a little woodblock print of a man reclining in an armchair, and the pinstriped suit of his foreshortened figure makes a flat pattern of vertical lines. Here we see already the young artist’s attraction to the oddities of perspective, but we are also reminded of the importance of medium and technique in his work.

It is a general shortcoming of printed reproductions, and even more so of those seen on a screen, that pictures tend to be flattened into generic images in which we lose much of the material and even tactile sense of different media. This is partly compensated in high-resolution digital reproduction by the possibility of examining textures and brushstrokes in detail, but the data remains purely visual, without the subtle but real physicality of the three-dimensional work.

Escher's Portrait of GA Escher (1935); Up and down (1947). © The MC Escher Company, the Netherlands.

Graphic works like those of Escher can suffer particularly from this kind of flattening, but here we are reminded of the extraordinary difference between pencil work — of an exacting standard of articulacy that few of us are ever likely to approach — ink and brush, woodcut, etching and lithography. Each medium offers not only different qualities of line and different ranges of tone, but differences of fluidity, continuity and discontinuity.

After his studies, Escher moved to Rome, leaving only with the rise of fascism in 1935, and it is in the landscapes of this period — almost completely unknown to most of his admirers — that we can see the development of his extraordinary virtuosity as a printmaker.

All of these prints, both woodblocks and ­lithographs, combine naturalistic views of landscape motifs with elements of modernist design and semi-abstract patterning, and all of them are concerned with effects and nuances of light and dark, the inevitable subjects of media executed in black and white.

It is in the management of tone that Escher demonstrates the greatest virtuosity. In one view, where he wants to reproduce the lighter tones of distant hills — what is known as aerial perspective — he emulates the Renaissance masters of chiaroscuro woodcut by inking the block with three different tones of black and grey (the original method, like Japanese ukiyo-e, used multiple blocks).

But then he develops a more sophisticated and at the same time more characteristic technique by incising the wood in the distance with an ever finer grid of vertical and horizontal lines, leaving less of the surface to take the ink and thus rendering the motifs in these areas less dark. It is a minute and painstaking technique that demands absolute certainty of design as well as precision in the cutting; elsewhere the same technique is used in an extraordinary print of dragonflies and leaves (1936).

Escher's Libellula (Dragonfly) (March 1936). © The MC Escher Company, the Netherlands.

Lithography, so often crude and anecdotal when poorly handled — and thus ideal for the illustrated newspapers of the 19th century — is employed by Escher with consummate subtlety. Generally he uses it when he wants particularly fine discriminations of tone without strong darks, but in one surprising image of a crowd watching fireworks (1933), he emulates the style of a mezzotint by starting with a plate completely covered in black ink, before wiping away the ink to different degrees to evoke a crowd of onlookers in the night, their upturned faces lit by the exploding rockets above.

Already during his years in Italy there is evidence of his fascination with perspective, particularly in the woodcut of the Tower of Babel (1928) and the wood engraving of the view from the dome of St Peter’s (1935): the extreme vertical perspective in each of these will reappear in some of the later and more famous prints, disturbing our more familiar understanding of perspective in depth, on the horizontal plane.

Other dimensions and distortions of space are explored with the use of curved mirrors and crystal balls, including the famous Self-portrait in a spherical mirror (1935) and another drawing in which a crystal ball, a mirrored sphere in which the artist is reflected and an opaque non-reflective sphere are all set side by side.

If these experiments with convex mirrors recall Parmigianino’s youthful self-portrait (1524), the complex architectural puzzles have antecedents both in Hogarth’s engraving of False perspective (1754) and in Piranesi’s proto-romantic Carceri d’invenzione (1750-61) in which gloomy dungeons seem to go on forever, with staircases leading to new levels and into deeper recesses.

In one of the best known of these works, Relativity (1953), figures seem at first sight to be climbing staircases, sitting at a table and leaning over balustrades in all directions at once, and the disconcerting thing is that one spatial reading blends seamlessly into another that contradicts it, as when two men pass on staircases going in opposite directions, one up and the other down, which seems impossible.

Escher's Pineta de Calvi, Corsica (June 1933). © The MC Escher Company, the Netherlands.

If we look carefully, however, we can see that the artist has woven together three planes of space, so there are figures that are upright in the normal sense from the primary orientation of the page, but also if we turn it 90 degrees in ­either direction. But just when we think we have worked out the interaction of these three planes, we realise that there is a figure in the middle of the composition who does not fit in, since he is seen from above: in a witty touch, he is carrying a sack over his shoulder, like a burglar who has broken in to the space to make it still more paradoxical. In another composition, Up and down (1947), we seem to be looking both up and down at the same time, but the secret to this is that in this world of vertical perspective, lines converge with distance in either direction. In yet another well-known design, Other world (1947), the continuity between different spatial orientations is assured by the fundamental armature of perspective convergence into depth.

Apart from these three-dimensional experiments, Escher was also fascinated with tessellation, and the way that living things could be reduced to simple patterns so that, for example, three interlocking lizards could be made into a continuous fabric of repeating forms capable of extending indefinitely with no interstices.

In the more elaborate versions of some of these designs, the flat patterns emerge into solid forms, as in Encounter (1944).

The exhibition ends with the artist’s final work, whose making was documented on film at the time, serpents symbolic of infinity coiling through intersecting polyhedrons receding and diminishing in size towards the centre of the composition, and Escher’s famous lithograph (1948) of two hands, each drawing the other, which sums up so much of his art in its extraordinary technical mastery and its delight in the play of illusion, its evocation of a flat picture becoming solid body, and its implication of a perpetual-motion ­process.

All of this is presented within an overall framework produced by a Japanese design firm, Nendo, beginning with a mysterious entry hall full of a swirl of light particles waiting to be given shape, and proceeding to rooms with mirrors, models of tiny houses, which the firm has taken as a leitmotif for its exhibition design, and even a room full of larger-scale model houses that open out and turn themselves inside out.

The Nendo contribution is not obtrusive or unpleasant, but it is not clear why it was ­necessary or even, ultimately, what it adds to the understanding of Escher’s work. Perhaps it was thought a loose sequence of installations would make the whole experience more contemporary?

Is an exhibition that demands this degree of close engagement otherwise beyond the capacity of a contemporary audience?

Certainly the Nendo installations and environments gave visitors with shorter attention spans something to take selfies or be photographed with for the compulsory social media documentation of their visit. In the end, it was hard to pay much attention to gratuitous forms that were no match for the density and complexity of Escher’s compelling and imaginary pictorial universe.

Escher X Nendo: Between Two Worlds

National Gallery of Victoria. Until April 7.