Maurits escher biography
M. C. Escher
Dutch graphic artist (1898–1972)
Maurits Cornelis Escher (;Dutch:[ˈmʌurɪtskɔrˈneːlɪsˈɛɕər]; 17 June 1898 – 27 March 1972) was a Dutch graphic artist who made woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints, many of which were inspired by mathematics. Despite wide popular interest, for most of his life Escher was neglected in the art world, even in his native Netherlands. He was 70 before a retrospective exhibition was held. In the late twentieth century, he became more widely appreciated, and in the twenty-first century he has been celebrated in exhibitions around the world.
His work features mathematical objects and operations including impossible objects, explorations of infinity, reflection, symmetry, perspective, truncated and stellated polyhedra, hyperbolic geometry, and tessellations. Although Escher believed he had no mathematical ability, he interacted with the mathematicians George Pólya, Roger Penrose, and Donald Coxeter, and the crystallographerFriedrich Haag, and conducted his own research into tessellation.
Early in his career, he drew inspiration from nature, making studies of insects, landscapes, and plants such as lichens, all of which he used as details in his artworks. He traveled in Italy and Spain, sketching buildings, townscapes, architecture and the tilings of the Alhambra and the Mezquita of Cordoba, and became steadily more interested in their mathematical structure.
Escher's art became well known among scientists and mathematicians, and in popular culture, especially after it was featured by Martin Gardner in his April 1966 Mathematical Games column in Scientific American. Apart from being used in a variety of technical papers, his work has appeared on the covers of many books and albums. He was one of the major inspirations for Douglas Hofstadter's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach.
Early life
Maurits Cornelis Escher was born on 17 June 1898 in Leeuwarden
M. C. Escher Biography
M. C. Escher, otherwise known as Maurits Cornelis Escher, carried many titles during his career as an artist. Often he was, and still is, referred to as a Specialist in Optical Art, Master of Symmetry, Dutch Engraver, Dutch Graphic Artist, Dutch Illustrator and Dutch Mathematician. All these titles hold true to the diversity of this man's style. His passions, or addictions as he so often called them, focused on tessellation (inter linking figurative work) and regular plane division.
Escher, born to a civil engineer June 17, 1898, was encouraged by his family at a young age to pursue an education in Architectural Arts. His lack of interest and poor grades led him in a different direction with his artistic talents. It was not until he reached age twenty-one that he discovered his true calling: Graphic Art. From then on, his success story writes itself. He taught himself in the areas of math and science through the study of technical papers in order to achieve his artistic goals. This caught the attention of many scientists and mathematicians, alike. It is often wondered if he was truly an artist or a mathematician by his own right. His particular artistic style is said to be what has bridged the gap between art and math and art and science.
Upon finishing Art school, M.C. Escher traveled Spain, France and Italy to vacation and gather inspiration for his work. Throughout his studies, he became more fascinated with structures than in regular portraits or landscapes. His early works suggests differently, as he placed his focus on particular places and people. He worked primarily in engraved woodcuts so he could repeat patterns quicker and easier. During his career, he never felt completely comfortable with calling himself an artist or an artisan. He felt such titles would limit his potential and cause too many barriers between his interests and the art world.
You will find many teachers and professors teaching his methods in the classroo Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972) is one of the world’s most famous graphic artists. His art is admired by millions of people worldwide, as can be seen by the many websites on the internet. He is born in Leeuwarden as the fourth and youngest son. After five years the family moves to Arnhem, where he spends most of his youth. After he has failed his final exam, and after a short interlude in Delft, M.C. Escher starts with his lessons in architecture at the School of Architecture and Decorative Arts in Haarlem. After completing his school, he travels for a long time through Italy, where he meets his wife Jetta Umiker and whom he marries in 1924. They go to Rome, where they live until 1935. During these 11 years M.C. Escher travels every year through Italy where he makes drawings and sketches that he later uses in his studio for his lithographs, woodcuts and wood engravings. For example, the background in the lithograph Waterfall (1961) comes from his Italian period. The trees that are reflected in the woodcut Puddle(1952) are also the same trees that he uses in his woodcut Pineta by Calvi, made in 1932. During the time that he lives and works in Italy, he makes beautiful, also more realistic works such as the Castrovalva litho in which one can see already his fascination for perspective: close, far, high and low. Likewise is the lithograph Atrani, a small town on the Amalfi coast in Italy, which he makes in 1931 and comes back in his masterpieces Metamorphosis I and II. He is most famous for his so-called impossible drawings, such as Ascending and Descending and Relativity, but also for his metamorphoses, such as Metamorphosis I, II and III, Air and Water I and Reptiles. During his lifetime, Escher made 448 lit Maurits Cornelius Escher
People expressed the opinion that he possessed a mathematical brain but he never excelled in the subject at any stage during his schooling and treated the subject with some considerable unease. He wrote [7]:- At high school in Arnhem, I was extremely poor at arithmetic and algebra because I had, and still have, great difficulty with the abstractions of numbers and letters. When, later, in stereometry [solid geometry], an appeal was made to my imagination, it went a bit better, but in school I never excelled in that subject. But our path through life can take strange turns.
Early reports detailed his methodological approach to life which was taken to be an unconscious reaction to his engineering family upbringing. As a child, Maurits always had an intensely creative side and an 'acute sense of wonder'. He often claimed to see shapes that he could relate to in the clouds.
Puddle
Click the picture to see a larger version
Maurits, and his good friend Bas Kist both developed a deep interest in printing techniques as a consequence of receiving good reports from their respective art departments who had encouraged their student to experiment.
Family aspirations that Maurits would train as an architect were disappointed when he failed his final exams in history, constitutional organisations, political economies and book keeping, and as a result he never officially graduated. His family moved to Oosterbeek where a loophole in Dutch law allowed Maurits to enrol
Already after a week he informs his father that he wants to quit his architecture lessons and focus on studying graphic arts. He is supported in this by his teacher Samuel Jesserun de Mesquita, to whom he has shown his drawings and linocuts.