M.C. Escher was a Dutch printmaker, born in Leeuwarden in 1898 and dead in 1972, who drew staircases that climb forever, two hands drawing each other and birds that turn into fish. Mathematicians loved him long before the art world did. He thought he had no gift for mathematics, and at school he had failed it.
The people who made Escher famous were scientists, not art critics. The man they took for one of their own had left school with a failure in the subject.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (1,000+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
In 1954 the International Congress of Mathematicians met in Amsterdam, and a show of Escher's prints went up at the Stedelijk Museum. One of the visitors was Roger Penrose.
A few years later he and his father Lionel published a drawing of a triangle of beams that cannot exist. Escher built Ascending and Descending, the endless staircase, on that triangle in 1960, and the waterfall that flows uphill a year later.
The mathematicians took him for a colleague. Escher did not. He believed he had no mathematical ability, and when a leading geometer answered one of his questions with a highly technical reply, he came away disappointed. A line often quoted from him says that he seemed to have more in common with mathematicians than with his fellow artists.
The art world, meanwhile, kept its distance. For most of his life, even in the Netherlands, critics found his work too intellectual and not lyrical enough.
What You'll Discover
What he failed at school.
What he carried out of a house.
Why he went to Granada twice.
What his son was made to wear.
What came before the staircase.
What a post office asked of him.