Seeing things from a different prospective

Impossible constructions, explorations of infinity and other sights that baffle yet fascinate the eye are the hallmark of Dutch artist MC Escher, on show at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

ART EXHIBITION Most of us, even those people with little interest in contemporary art, will know who MC Escher is. Even if we’ve never heard his name, the stark black and white images he produced were everywhere in the latter part of the 20th Century in particular.

Creating incredibly detailed visual puzzles, he was the artist responsible for those logic-defying images of staircases looping back upon one another (like 1951’s House of Stairs and 1953’s Relativity) and images containing patterns and realistic images fusing together (1939-40s’ Metamorphosis II is a good example).

During the 1960s, in the latter years of his life, he turned down the chance to work with Stanley Kubrick and create an album cover for the Rolling Stones but subsequent generations of hipsters and students snapped up prints and art books by the Dutchman Maurits Cornelis Escher, the former architecture student who was born in 1898 and died in 1972. Incredibly, this show in Edinburgh is the first major UK retrospective of his work.

“I’ve always liked his work and I thought it might be a good idea to show it,” says Patrick Elliott, chief curator at the Scottish National Galleries of Modern Art. “It struck me as odd that someone who was that famous hadn’t had a retrospective and also that there’s no work by Escher in any of the great galleries in Britain, like the Tate, the British Museum or the V&A. It’s not so much that he was unfashionable, it’s that he wasn’t even fashionable enough to be unfashionable. No one has paid him that much attention, his images are like wallpaper and you don’t really think about the originals.”

Produced with the help of the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, this show features all of the major examples of Escher’s work from throughout his career, most of which were produced in limited run woodcut prints, as well as some preparatory sketches and a wealth of biographical information.

“Looking at reproductions is like looking at a carbon copy of a photocopy,” says Elliott of why people should view the originals. “You just don’t feel the beauty and precision and technique that’s involved in creating these. The woodcuts would be made with fine chisels and then printed up; it was always done by hand. He loved doing it himself; he didn’t have assistants.”

The show is open already and Elliott says it’s been very popular, particularly – and unexpectedly – with fascinated children. “Escher was loved by odd groups of people,” he says, “he was liked by teenagers, by psychedelic musicians and rock stars and by mathematicians – but not really by the museum world.

“He was a bit too popular for his own good, I think.”

He loved doing it himself; he didn’t have assistants

The Amazing World of MC Escher, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art Two, Edinburgh, runs until September 27. www.nationalgalleries. org

Three Spheres II, 1946, by MC Escher.