M.C. Escher’s Early Geometry Takes Center Stage at Somerset House
A new London exhibition is reframing M.C. Escher not as a cult curiosity, but as a rigorously inventive artist whose work moved between architecture, pattern, and visual paradox. “M.C. Escher: The Exhibition” at Somerset House brings together more than 150 works made between 1918 and 1964, tracing the Dutch artist’s path from early studies to the intricate compositions that made him one of the 20th century’s most recognizable image-makers.
Born in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands, in 1898, Maurits Cornelis Escher studied under Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita at the Haarlem School of Architecture and Decorative Arts until 1922, after first hoping to become an architect. His early drawings already show the disciplined line and structural clarity that would define his later work. Travel soon widened that visual vocabulary. In Italy, where he lived in Rome for more than a decade until 1935, Escher recorded steep townscapes and coastal architecture with a precision that feels both observational and slightly unreal.
One of the exhibition’s key turning points is Escher’s 1936 visit to the Alhambra in southern Spain. The fortress’s decorative tilework gave him a lasting model for tessellation, the repeated arrangement of shapes across a surface without gaps or overlaps. That encounter, combined with ideas he later discussed with his half-brother Berend, a professor at Leiden University, led him toward crystallography and a more systematic approach to pattern. Over time, Escher created about 137 watercolors in the series “Regular Division of the Plane,” turning birds, reptiles, fish, and other forms into interlocking visual systems.
The show also follows his move toward metamorphosis, in which one motif gradually becomes another, and toward the visual paradoxes that made works such as “Square Limit” and “Snakes” so enduring. Those images are often associated with mathematics, psychedelia, and popular culture, but the exhibition makes a stronger case for Escher as an artist of exacting thought. His work is less about illusion for its own sake than about testing how far perception can be stretched before it begins to fold back on itself.
That tension between order and instability remains the exhibition’s most compelling thread. Seen together, the works suggest an artist who found in geometry not a constraint, but a way to imagine the world anew.
