Even people not knowledgeable about 20th-century European art have doubtless run into the work of the Dutch graphic artist M. C. Escher. His prints and drawings using impossible perspectives and relying on optical illusions and visual puzzles have long intrigued audiences worldwide.
While the exhibition of Escher’s work that opened at the Monnaie de Paris, the historic French mint, in Paris in December last year does not play down the importance of these famous images that perhaps have contributed most to the artist’s reputation, it nevertheless places a special emphasis on his interest in tessellation, the filling of two-dimensional space with identical repeating elements.
It draws attention to the significant role played in this aspect of Escher’s work by the similar use of tessellation in traditional Islamic art, perhaps best known from the decorative tilework used on buildings. Escher was particularly influenced by the decoration used in mediaeval North African architecture, as seen in many mosques, madrasas, and other buildings in Morocco as well as at the Alhambra palace complex in Granada and the Mosque-Cathedral in Cordoba, among the most spectacular remaining architectural achievements of Islamic Spain.
Escher visited the Alhambra in the 1920s and 1930s when the site, though more or less restored from the ruinous state it had been in before the 19th century, was much less well-known than it is today. He was fascinated by the decorative tilework used in the building, and he spent days or weeks studying it and making extensive copies. It was this interest in Islamic tessellation, and the powerful stimulus that it gave to his thinking, that laid the foundations for some of Escher’s own most characteristic later designs.
Born in 1898 in the Netherlands, Escher was trained in technical drawing, architecture, and graphic design first in Delft and then in Haarlem, with the intention to become an illustrator and commercial artist. The first part of the Paris exhibition contains various examples of his early work, which, influenced by art nouveau and a kind of looming symbolism, dominant trends in the European visual arts of the time, do little to predict Escher’s later interest in mathematical objects and visual puzzles, even if they do show off his skill in producing engravings of subjects from the natural world.
Perhaps Escher was not happy with the limited opportunities that his training would likely have given him, and possibly also with his position on the outer fringes of the European art world. In 1921, he began a series of journeys in southern Europe, something like extended study trips that extended his horizons and gave him new subjects for his work. He lived in Rome between 1923 and 1935 and visited destinations throughout Italy and in neighbouring countries including France and Spain.
In 1922, he visited the Alhambra palace complex outside Granada for the first time, visiting again for a longer period in 1936 one year after he had relocated to Switzerland to escape the increasingly aggressive political atmosphere in Italy at the time. It was during his first visit to the Alhambra, and above all during the second, that Escher discovered the art of tessellation that changed the direction of his work and led to some of his most famous later designs.
Built at various times between 1238 and 1358 by the mediaeval Arab rulers of Granada, then an emirate of Andalucia or southern Spain, the Alhambra is a group of palace buildings whose walls, floors, and sometimes ceilings are covered in intricate designs arranged in repeating geometric patterns, with shapes like stars and polygons fitting together to cover the surfaces without gaps.
Following its rediscovery by visitors like the American writer Washington Irving in the early 19th century, the Alhambra, like the mediaeval Mosque-Cathedral in nearby Cordoba, became popular with European and other visitors looking for inspiration from traditional Islamic designs.
The British writer Owen Jones, author of the Grammar of Ornament, included numerous patterns from the Alhambra in this voluminous compendium of Islamic and other designs, using it as a resource for decoration. 19th-century French writers as various as François-René de Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo, and Théophile Gautier created a romantic image of the Alhambra as a remnant of a past civilisation, though one with much to say about the history of the Mediterranean and particularly that of Spain.
Islamic stimulus: Escher’s first visit to the Alhambra in 1922 was part of a more general tour of Italy and Spain, and it seems to have had little impact on the work he produced during the rest of the decade.
The second section of the Paris exhibition contains examples of this, with Escher producing images of landscapes and buildings, often inspired by Italian scenes, as well as lithographs or woodcuts intended to illustrate books or for sale in limited editions.
Among them are a set of six woodcuts, the Days of Creation, that illustrate texts taken from the Biblical book of Genesis and a series of Emblemata, made in 1931, that consist of woodcuts illustrating often moralising texts. It was also in 1931 that Escher made the two dozen or so woodcuts illustrating the Terrible Adventures of Scholastica by writer Jan Wallach, some of which are also on show in the Paris exhibition.
It was the second visit to the Alhambra, in 1936, that led to a decisive change in Escher’s work, however, with “the ornamental motifs used in the buildings fascinating him to such an extent that he began to study the tessellation in a systematic way,” as the notes provided with the Paris exhibition put it. He was particularly fascinated by the way in which “one or several shapes could be repeated over and over again without either overlapping or leaving empty spaces between them.”
“The use of such tessellation became one of the main features of Escher’s work and one in which imagination and geometry could be skillfully combined,” the exhibition says. “He now devoted himself more and more to abstract compositions or to compositions including elements of fantasy or geometrical transformations.”
“The study of tessellation,” suggested by the wall, floor, and ceiling motifs used in the Alhambra, “led Escher to explore how infinity can be visually represented by endlessly subdividing the plane” into repeating identical elements, the notes to the exhibition say. Each of these elements is locked into a tight relationship with its neighbours like squares on a chessboard, hexagonal cells in a honeycomb, or the polygons and stars in traditional Islamic designs.
The third section of the exhibition gives examples of such work in pieces taken from the collection Regular Division of the Plane published by Escher in 1957 following a commission from the Roos Foundation. This contains an introductory essay and illustrations of ideas he had been working on since the 1930s and his second visit to the Alhambra in Spain.
They are further illustrated in the exhibition’s fourth section, titled “Metamorphoses,” which shows how Escher built on his experiments with tessellation to include elements of fantasy, with natural elements such as animals, birds, and reptiles replacing the repeating geometric forms he had used earlier to produce larger and even humorous designs.
Day and Night, for example, a woodcut produced in 1938, shows an interlocking pattern of birds gradually emerging towards the top of the image from the squares of a horizontally mirrored landscape. In Sky and Water, also included in the exhibition, the tessellated elements consist of birds and fish that fit into each other like pieces in a jigsaw before differentiating themselves more decisively towards the edges of the picture plane.
Metamorphosis II, made in 1939-1940, a larger-scale piece, shows tessellated animals gradually changing into each other across the horizontal plane. This section of the exhibition also includes Reptiles, one of the best-known of these early experiments in animal tessellation. Developed out of earlier sketches, Study of the Regular Division of the Plane with Reptiles, and constructed on a hexagonal grid, this shows the heads of red, green, and white reptiles meeting at a vertex and their tails, legs, and sides interlocking exactly to form a potentially infinite pattern.
Standard accounts of Escher’s work such as The Magic of M.C. Escher edited by J.L. Locher, director of the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague where the first major retrospective of Escher’s work was held in 1968, include pages of drawings made by Escher of the decorative tilework used at the Alhambra in Granada and the Mosque-Cathedral in Cordoba, showing how ideas from this were transformed into tessellated fish, birds, insects, reptiles, dogs, and sometimes human figures, with fish and reptiles perhaps emerging as favourites.
The fifth, sixth, and seventh sections of the exhibition look at the work that Escher produced during his post-war career, focusing particularly on the kind of visual puzzles for which he later became best known. Escher, who died in 1972 not far from where he was born in the Netherlands, enjoyed a kind of Indian summer in the 1960s when his later work was taken up by the youth movements of the time, which saw it as illustrating their own “psychedelic” culture, with its interest in altered perception, visual paradoxes, and reality-transforming imagery.
Escher’s experiments with tessellation, the puzzles of perception, and visual tricks found their way onto the walls of countless student bedrooms, as well as, perhaps more seriously, into the hands of the mathematical and scientific community. Physicists and mathematicians like the UK Nobel-Prize winner Roger Penrose entered into correspondence with Escher about the ways in which his art visually expressed complicated mathematical ideas.
The US computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter later paid Escher the compliment of linking him with the 18th-century German composer J.S. Bach and the early 20th-century German mathematician Kurt Gödel in his Gödel, Escher, Bach, a massive tome not published until 1979 but expressing many of the reality-transforming themes characteristic of the youth movements of the 1960s in the US and parts of Europe.
The exhibition includes well-known pieces from Escher’s production from this time, including his Möbius Strip, 1963, a twisted strip of paper that only has one side whereas ordinarily it should have two, and his images of impossible buildings such as Belvedere, 1958, and Ascending and Descending, 1960, apparently inspired by the 18th-century Italian artist Giovanni Piranesi.
These challenge the eye with logical and interpretative puzzles, rather in the manner of Penrose’s own Penrose Triangle, a solid-looking object that nevertheless could not exist in three-dimensional space, and optical illusions such as Rubin’s Vase or Wittgenstein’s Duck-Rabbit, which seem to flicker between two interpretations.
M.C. Escher, Monnaie de Paris, Paris, until 1 March.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 9 April, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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