OUT OF THE OFFICE: From Escherphilia to Escherology

Sal Iaquinta, MD

Highly technical. A devotion to symmetry. Creative.

Those phrases sound like requirements for my job—I spend most of my days removing facial skin cancers and reconstructing the defects. But I’m actually talking here about the art of M.C. (Maurits Cornelis) Escher, the 20th-century Dutch printmaker whose idiosyncratic work enjoys wide popularity. Of course, anyone who knows me understands my attraction to Escher’s art, but I hope I come off a bit less OCD than he does.

My adventure into the world of Escher started off like most. As a teenager, I was wowed by his impossible buildings and interlocked animals “infinitely filling” a plane. On my 18th birthday my mom took me to an Escher exhibit in Madison, Wisconsin. I left the show with a couple of Escher posters that traveled with me from dorm room to apartment throughout college. It sounds typical: Escher’s work is often considered “college art” rather than “high art.” Some might argue that it’s gimmicky, but isn’t that true of a lot of art? Splattering paint on canvas isn’t a gimmick? How about painting soup cans?

Obviously I’m biased. I’ll give the critics that Escher’s output was prints, not paintings. Many people have no idea what an “original” print is. In Escher’s day the question was a lot easier to answer—there were no computers, much less inkjet printers. Nowadays giclée printers reproduce images on canvas or paper with near-original quality.

For Escher, an original was printed from the “block.” Escher’s blocks were primarily woodcuts and lithographs. A woodcut is created by carving or etching an image into a flat wooden block and then rolling ink onto the block. The inked block is then pressed onto paper, like a giant stamp, creating an image (see explanation at the end of this article).

Lithographs are a little more complex. An image is drawn on a flat stone surface with an oil-based pencil. Then, using water and oil-based ink, the image can be transferred to paper.

So, an original is whatever comes off the block—wood or stone—onto the paper. Escher had all of his blocks and stones deliberately destroyed upon his death, so the only original prints that exist were made in his lifetime. Moreover, Escher signed most of the larger prints. Some pieces were printed hundreds of times; others just a few.

Regardless of scarcity, I wanted one.

In the early 2000s I decided to try finding an Escher print. I discovered that a gallery in San Francisco had specialized in Escher’s artwork for decades but had recently closed. So I did a Google search. A couple of options popped up. I called the first number, and it was the very man who had put on the show I saw in Madison. Now in Santa Cruz, he invited me to see some of his pieces and buy one. I made the trip and saw about a hundred works. A few things struck me that day. First, Escher had created a large body of work before the “gimmicks.” Most of the images he created between ages 20 and 40 were Italian landscapes and cityscapes. Although they’re not as famous, these early works highlight Escher’s technical skill in much the same way that Dali’s oeuvre from the period before he became a surrealist shows genuine talent for realism.

The second thing I realized is that art books don’t do justice to Escher’s work. Shrinking a large, colorful woodcut down to a few inches and printing it in black and white on a page sandwiched between other works just doesn’t work; but that’s exactly the case in Escher’s catalogue raisonné, the comprehensive listing of all his known work. Even the posters don’t come close to his original work. Many of Escher’s tessellated works (characterized by perfectly interlocked shapes, without overlaps or gaps) have a rigidity to them, especially when viewed in books. In actuality, they are printed on very delicate, handmade papers, which offset the stiff geometry of composition. The ink almost glistens as though still wet after all these decades. When you see it, you know it must not be touched.

I bought Fishes and Frogs, a small transformative tessellation that embodies the very essence of Escher. At the top, fish swim in water. The spaces between the fish morph into frogs (which is what makes this tessellation a transformative one) as the fish themselves devolve into the land behind the frogs. This was a much smaller version of the far more famous Sky and Water in which birds and fish tessellate. But it was all I needed to find myself enthralled. I wanted to know more and see more. I was hooked.

Books offered a basic history of the man and his art, but I wanted more. The Escher Foundation’s website wasn’t very robust either. In fact, Escher’s biography hasn’t even been translated into English. One rumor is that the copyright holder thinks it portrays Escher poorly. Yes, Escher did go through a divorce, and he was probably a bit obsessive-compulsive. These days he might even be perceived as falling somewhere on the Asperger’s spectrum. But the excerpts from his journals and letters that I’ve read portray an introvert with a gentle soul; a clever man who is constantly amazed by the wonders of nature and at the same time boyishly curious as to why her rules can’t be broken. Escher tried to break them as subtly as he could. It’s one thing to create impossible buildings; it’s another to invent a creature that curls into a ball to roll around because “nature doesn’t use the wheel.”

So, in an effort to find owners and sellers and to collect and disseminate information, I created a website—
eschersite.com—and filled it with nearly 600 images and a bucketful of  “Escherology.” A whole section is devoted to fakes and reprints—the things people think are real because along the way museums and others have made some convincing reproductions. It kills me to see people paying ridiculous sums for posters they think are originals. In the good old days, you could email other eBay bidders. When I told one bidder the Hand with Reflecting Sphere was a poster, he replied, “You’re just trying to scare me off of bidding.”

The site’s popularity continues to grow. I’ve had the opportunity to meet with curators, former gallery owners, collectors who have met Escher, and even the owner of the Escher estate. I’ve contributed writings to museum catalogs. And the most fun: finding new homes for Escher artworks that former owners no longer want (or leave behind).

One highlight of these adventures was setting up a show in Rome at a mathematics festival. Yes, festival is the right word. The goal was to show students that there are exciting careers in mathematics, e.g., physicist, economist, computer scientist. I got to witness people’s first impressions of Escher’s art and watch their faces as they discovered the impossibility of works such as Belvedere. (Impossible sounds so much better when exclaimed in Italian!) Thanks to a generous invitation, my girlfriend and I went out to dinner with some of the speakers—including five Nobel Prize winners. We shared a table with the now deceased John Nash—the inspiration for the movie A Beautiful Mind—and his family.

Escher belonged at that table of aging geniuses. Very few artists can make the claim that they continued to create better compositions with every passing year. Many artists, like many Nobel physicists, achieve acclaim for work they did in their 20s. Then they spend the remainder of their lives reliving, recreating and minutely tweaking the ideas that brought them recognition. But not Escher. He created Belvedere at age 60.

I hope I can say I’m doing my best work at age 60. I think I know how Escher did it. He never stopped exploring new ideas. He wasn’t afraid to solicit others’ advice. And he was patient enough to make sure everything he did was done as well as he possibly could. Sounds like a perfect recipe for success in medicine, too.

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Dr. Iaquinta is a San Rafael otolaryngologist.

Email: salvatore.iaquinta@kp.org