Art: n-Dimensional Reality

In his time, the Dutch artist Maurits Cornelis Escher seemed a cultural anomaly. He loathed modern art—"I consider 60% of the artists nuts and fakes," he said of Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum—and was duly ignored by it. For most of his working life, critics dismissed him as a pedantic illustrator. Born in 1898, Escher was 52 before his tightly executed woodcuts, lithographs and engravings began to attract even a crumb of attention. A retiring, ironic man with the bony nose and goat beard of an El Greco prelate, Escher took no part in art debates,...