M.C. Escher: the original optical illusionist

By Anna Baldasty

To understand the achievement of Dutch artist M.C. Escher, try to imagine majors in engineering, art history and music collaborating on one creative project. But instead of anticipating a disastrous hodgepodge, prepare for an electrifying synthesis.

Escher's prints and drawings, currently displayed in the San Jose Museum of Art exhibit "M.C. Escher: Rhythm of Illusion," drew upon his architectural and musical background to create works of art remarkable in their precision and symmetry.

For Escher, art was not spontaneous and fluid but something that required close attention to pattern, rhythm and design. He created highly detailed works that reveal an almost obsessive devotion to mathematical exactness.

What is most compelling about Escher is that he realized minute effects by working with high contrast media like woodcuts and lithographs. Each image began as a template -- a stamp of carved metal, wood or stone. Escher had to carve every detail of the print into the template, add ink to the raised surfaces and then apply his template to paper.

This print-making technique is as difficult as it is time consuming, for it limits the artist's color palette and forces him or her to consider detail exclusively in terms of positive and negative space. Escher's intricate works likewise showcase his ability to use exactness to distort perspective and space.

Having studied linear perspective and its role in creating the illusion of depth, Escher experimented with linear techniques in order to alter a traditional three-dimensional sense of reality. In "Other World," for example, he divides the scene into quadrants and tips the content of each square in various directions.

Still, the four disparate parts are somehow welded together seamlessly into a unified whole so that the viewer's eye cannot quite process what exactly is amiss.

The alteration of perspective and Escher's depiction of strange settings perhaps testifies to the influence of his 1922 trip to Spain and the artistic movements he encountered there, notably the surrealism of Salvador Dalí and the cubism of Pablo Picasso.

He was also strongly influenced by the Alhambra, a 14th-century Moorish palace in Granada, a city in southern Spain. Escher spent weeks drawing the Moorish tiles that cover the Alhambra palace walls in endless mosaics, and it was on this trip that his work began to dismiss natural forms and rely more heavily on geometric patterns.

But his time in Spain did not just introduce him to variant artistic perspectives. During another trip, Escher was in Spain the same year that Francisco Franco seized control of the country and began installing his dictatorship. In addition, Escher was forced to leave his home in Italy to avoid the growing militancy and street violence of Mussolini's regime as it defied the League of Nations and invaded Ethiopia.

As European fascism gained momentum and moved the continent toward World War II, Escher's vision began to reflect the darkness and rigidity of totalitarian societies. The connection is implicit but manifest nonetheless. Two of Escher's most famous works, "Relativity" and "Ascending and Descending," show faceless beings walking up and down flights of stairs.

These figures are indeed people, but their humanity feels absent as they mindlessly move toward an undisclosed destination. They are uniform, methodical and relentless, and the viewer cannot help but feel as if these inhuman guards are monitoring something sinister.

"M.C. Escher: The Rhythm of Illusion," which runs until April 22, successfully captures the political anxieties and creative influences of an artist whose career culminated in a time of conservative ideology, but also at a time of artistic revolution when artists began to bend reality to interrogate the mind of the observer.

Student admission to the exhibit is $5. A somewhat gimmicky, cell phone-activated gallery guide is available, but visitors will find docent-led tours starting at 12:30 and 2:30 more helpful.

Contact Anna Baldasty at (408) 551-1918 or abaldasty@scu.edu.