Art: The Gamesman

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Maurits Cornells Escher (rhymes with mesher) looks like an El Greco cardinal in modern mufti. A gaunt, stooped 56, he wears his white spade beard, sport jacket and grey flannels with the air of a severe fellow who knows what matches what. Odd yet precise matches are Escher's forte. An exhibition of his woodcuts and lithographs in Washington last week featured flights of birds set off against schools of fish, lizards spinning in polyhedrons through the night sky, eerie figures climbing both the top and bottom sides of stairs. His art, as clear and cold as snowflakes, had visitors seeing double and buying by lots. Last week the show was almost sold out at prices ranging from $17 to $40.

Curiously, Escher has had little success in his native Holland. He lives quietly in Baarn, works up about half a dozen prints a year. An exhibition of his art in the Baarn high school (TIME, April 2, 1951) caught the attention of a few connoisseurs of the incomprehensible and led to last week's U.S. show. Critic Leslie Portner of the Washington Post and Times Herald reported that "critics in Europe have been trying for quite some time now to cubbyhole Escher," and proceeded to review the holes: "They have called him a mathematician, because he uses geometric solids in many of his works. They might also call him a photographer, because of the precision of his exact realism; or a surrealist, for his surprising juxtapositions; or a visionary, because of his use of monsters and dragons; or an. architect, for his carefully rendered facades and buildings. He is all of these things, and one thing more: an artist."

Artist Escher once made naturalistic prints in Italy. Says he: "In Italy nature is so rich one must do nature. But in the north, in Holland, nature doesn't suggest anything to me, and so I have to work from imagination. It was lucky for me that I left Italy—but to do what I have done since, I had to have all that nature first." Even in his Italian days, however, Escher had a passion for patterns. Then the abstract mosaics in Spain's Alhambra suggested to him the possibility of combining tight, flat patterns with illusions of spatial depth, and he has been drawing elaborate illusions ever since. "All my works," Escher says mildly, "are games. Serious games."