None of the landscapes in those countries, however, impressed Escher in the way that the Italian ones had. After short spells in Switzerland and Belgium, they ended up in the Netherlands. The rise of Fascism prompted the Eschers to leave Italy in the mid-1930s. He also began to play games with vanishing points and perspective, a practice he would continue, in more extreme form, in the signature works from later in his career. Escher captured them in an arresting way, sometimes looking down at them from above, sometimes looking up from below. These tended to be picturesque hillside places, often with medieval towers (such as Goriano Sicoli, Abruzzi). Trips up and down Italy would provide the inspiration for his first major body of work: atmospheric woodcuts and lithographs depicting Italian towns and villages. In his early years, Escher experimented with a number of styles, including Cubism and Art Nouveau, all of which he jettisoned. I don’t belong anywhere.’ Woodcuts and lithographs of Italian towns As he told George in a letter towards the end of his life: ‘It is very sad, but it is a fact, that I… speak a language that very few can understand. He had to wait until 1968 to see his first retrospective - held at the Haags Gemeentemuseum (now the Kunstmuseum Den Haag) in The Hague, to mark his 70th birthday. In truth, never in his lifetime did he really feel accepted by the art establishment. The following year the couple moved to Italy, where two of their three sons, George and Arthur, were born, and where they would remain for a decade.Įscher was still struggling to make his name at the time, and relied on significant financial help from his parents and in-laws. The year 1924 was an important one for Escher: he had his first solo exhibition - at a small gallery in The Hague - and married his fiancée, Jetta. He soon realised, however, that art was his calling, and he moved to Haarlem, where he studied graphic arts under the highly regarded teacher Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita. He failed his final exams, and it was only through his father’s personal connections that he was accepted on an architecture course at the Technical Institute of Delft. He was a sickly boy and had to spend a long period of time in a convalescent home for infants. Maurits Cornelis Escher was born into a bourgeois family in the city of Leeuwarden in the northern Netherlands, where his father was a hydro-mechanical engineer. Escher has been cited as an influence by an array of cultural figures, from Hwang Dong-hyuk, creator of the hit Netflix TV series Squid Game, to Christopher Nolan, writer-director of the Oscar-winning 2010 sci-fi film Inception.
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