M C Escher and prog
- garethsprogblog
- 3 hours ago
- 4 min read
I recently went to see an M.C. Escher exhibition at Somerset House in London, the second time I'd gone to a dedicated display of his artwork, but much more extensive than the previous showing at the Dulwich Gallery in 2015. Escher is an artist who fascinates me, partly because his prints show incredible cartographical, architectural, mathematical, botanical and zoological detail, but also because his work was adopted by the hippie movement as an art of altered perception.
Maurits Cornelis Escher was born on 17th June 1898 in Leeuwardens, Netherlands and went on to study graphic art at the School of Architecture. Decorative Arts and Crafts in Haarlem under the guidance of Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita. He excelled at woodcut, developed an interest in other printmaking techniques, including lithography and with the deployment of simple but bold lines, displayed a talent for the representation of naturalistic subjects and the essence of forms. His early works revealed a series of themes that would recur throughout his career, all centred around his careful observation of nature, geometric compositions and the first hints of tessellations.
Escher accepted different commissions throughout his life: bookplates, cards, company logos, stamps, and pieces for advertising, but he turned down a request by the Rolling Stones for a design for an album cover. However, a series of LP covers representing the music of a variety of genres formed part of the display, noting that his works gained unexpected visibility beginning in the mid-1960s through the hippie movement, with his images reproduced on posters, T-shirts and album artwork, making them symbols of alternative culture. The hippies’ appropriation and alteration of his images to create psychedelic posters with fluorescent colours that glowed when illuminated with UV light irritated Escher. While this was an infringement of copyright, giving new titles to the altered works more suited to the counterculture (Three Spheres I became ‘Peace on Earth’ and Tower of Babel became ‘Tower of Victory’), the intense colouration distorted his work and the intended illusion.
Regardless of his disapproval for unauthorised use of his work, bootleggers, who obviously don’t worry about copyright, have used Escher’s work for a number of album sleeves. The exhibition highlighted the use of Relativity, a famous lithograph from 1953, as the cover for On The Run – The Live Biography Volume Three, an unofficial 1987 release by Pink Floyd on the US International Records label, although more examples of Escher’s work feature on the LP sleeves of different releases in that series. Alongside the wholesale theft of his work, a number musicians, including prog and prog-related artists have employed illustrators to interpreted his ideas and present them at album art.
The front cover of Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma, designed by Storm Thorgerson of Hipgnosis, takes the idea from the illusory effect of receding imagery tending towards infinity (see Thorgerson’s book Mind Over Matter The Images of Pink Floyd p.30). The notion that infinity drawings ‘were Pink Floyd material’ was posited by Libby January, Thorgerson’s partner at the time, and though Escher isn’t acknowledged in Thorgerson’s book, the idea had been illustrated by Escher in a 1956 lithograph with the title Print Gallery, presented at the exhibition as an interactive installation where the visitor was captured by a video camera looking at Escher’s artwork before zooming in to see themself inside the picture, looking at the art ad infinitum.
The principle behind Escher’s 1955 woodcut and woodcut print(s) Profondeurs (Depth) was explored in another interactive exhibition called The Infinity Room, where a booth with all the inner surfaces were made of mirrors. The exact same effect can be seen in Willie Christie’s cover artwork for (No Pussyfooting) by Fripp & Eno.
Escher was not a trained mathematician, but he displayed a visual and intuitive knowledge of the subject, and in 1954 his prints were exhibited at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Amsterdam, sparking a close dialogue with mathematicians and crystallographers.
Escher first visited Italy in 1921 and lived in Rome from 1923 to 1935. He travelled widely throughout Italy and the Mediterranean and became familiar with the engravings of the architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778.) Piranesi’s Carceri d'Invenzione (Imaginary Prisons) is a series depicting imaginary architecture which evidently influenced Escher’s own impossible constructions. These architectures and compositions distinguished themselves through distortions of perspective that at first glance appeared perfectly plausible but, upon closer inspection, prove impossible. While these geometric paradoxes would reach a high level of complexity in Relativity, 1953; Belvedere, 1958; Ascending and Descending, 1960, the cover artwork for Mike Oldfield’s Boxed (1976), designed by the Coole Key agency, borrows the theme of the earlier Escher impossible perspective engraving Other World, 1947, considered a masterpiece for combining three views: nadir, horizon and zenith.
The adoption of the Escher-like logo by Van der Graaf Generator for their 1975-76 reunion albums Godbluff, Still Life and World Record was rather iconic, stylistically linking the three sonically-related releases, and I felt it appropriate that the 2005 reunion quartet retained the same graphic.
The logo is a distillation of Waterfall, Belvedere, and Ascending and Descending, which cannot exist in three dimensions. The ‘impossible triangle’ that forms the ‘V’ of Van der Graaf Generator on these albums was used extensively from 1934 onwards by Swedish graphic artist Oscar Reutersvärd (1915 - 2002) as a standalone geometric form, before becoming popularised in 1958 by Nobel Prize-winning mathematician and physicist Roger Penrose, who dubbed the triangle as ‘impossibility in its purest form’, and it is now known as the Penrose Triangle. Escher’s understanding of the mathematical implications of the figure only came about through his acquaintance with Penrose. It was featured in the exhibition as a 3D model that only took on the Penrose Triangle form from a single perspective.
A couple of prog-related album illustrations are Todd Rundgren’s A Wizard A True Star, and the impossible triangle featured on Split by Maat Lander and Øresund Space Collective.
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