In a letter to his son Arthur, Escher wrote: “I want to tell you about a ‘brother’ with whom I have made acquaintance.” The ‘brother’ is Bruno Ernst, the man who wrote the book: The Magic Mirror of M. C. Escher. Apparently they belonged to the same religious order. Escher and Ernst do not give us any details on the religious order other than that it “…was primarily engaged in education.”
Escher was a thinker, a contemplative man. Did he have any thoughts on Jesus, God, or Scripture? If so, what can Christian’s learn from him?
Apart from belonging to a religious order and having his first son, George, Christened there aren’t a lot of details about Escher’s formal religious activities. But Escher is an artist. He is a man who spoke through his art. His art reveals at great deal.
The image shown is the 1937 print Metamorphosis I. It is a good example of Escher speaking through his art.
The gallery at the M. C. Escher website, http://www.mcescher.com/gallery/, has many of Escher’s prints grouped by period. Escher’s early work through 1922 is dominated by portraits. From 1923 to 1935 the portraits continue, but landscapes become the dominate subject. You see Escher flirting with the concept of tessellations during these two periods in his prints Plane-filling Motif with Human Figures, and Eight Heads.
In 1937 Escher creates Metamorphosis I. On the left of the print we see a landscape. The Italian coastal town, Atrani. The buildings in the town become more regular as we move to the right and morph into three dimension cubes. The cubes in turn morph into a simple human figure tessellation. At the far right, a final human figure adorned in festive clothing and wearing a broad smile rotates free out of the tessellation.
Escher had found what he had been looking for; a repeated motif with a human figure. Regular division of the plane would hold Escher’s fascination for the remainder of his life. As important as the personal discovery of tessellations, we see in the print metamorphosis a transition from the subject of landscapes to a repeated tile motif. The transition taking place is what is happening to Escher as an artist. Escher is changing as an artist, and this print captures his artistic metamorphoses.
In a discussion on being a graphic artist, Escher states: “The primary purpose of all art forms, whether music, literature, or the visual arts, is to say something to the outside world; in other words, to make a personal thought, a striking idea, an inner emotion perceptible to other people’s senses in such a way that there is no uncertainty about the maker’s intentions. The artist’s ideal is to produce a crystal-clear reflect of his own self.” In the print Metamorphosis I, Escher is simply showing us the change that he is going through.
We are ready to look at Biblical themes in Escher’s art. We begin in Part 3.