Maurits Cornelis Escher – The spatial experience

M.C. Escher’s strange mental constructions continue to fascinate. They are currently being exhibited (28 March – 14 October 2011) at the monumental Alhambra Palace and the adjacent Generalife in Granada, Spain.

Born at the end of the 19th century, the Dutchman Maurits Cornelis ESCHER (1898-1972) was educated as an architect and engraver in Haarlem. Although his father was a hydraulic engineer, his impressive mental constructions are not so much the work of a mathematician as they are the fruit of a brilliant imagination. As a young man Escher’s travels took him to Sienna in 1923 and Rome from 1925 to 1935. He also visited the Great Mosque of Cordoba and Granada’s Alhambra Palace which both left a lifelong impression on him. His vision of the remarkable paving and tiling (tessellations) at the Alhambra transformed his work after 1936 and set him on a path that was to bring global success during his lifetime. Known and published throughout the world, the market for Escher’s works is mainly focused on Holland (50% of his auction transactions, accounting for 46% of his global auction revenue), the United States (37% of transactions) and the UK (5%).

His inspiration borrows from the geometrical designs and patterns found in Islamic art and particularly the art of defying the laws of perspective and the limits of perspicacity. Symmetry, repetition, transformation, morphing from one shape to another, taking viewers to the threshold of hallucination. In the world according to M.C. Escher, night and day coincide, staircases go up and down simultaneously, East and West overlap and fish become birds with disconcerting fluidity.

Engraving as art
While Escher mastered the technical aspects of engraving – his favourite artistic medium – early in his life, it was not until his late thirties that he forged the artistic identity for which he is so well known today. M.C. Escher stated that “The notion of relations between the surface and the space is (…) a source of emotions, and emotions trigger a very strong desire – or at least a stimulant – to create an image”.
Escher’s most sought-after works belong to the Metamorphoses series inaugurated in 1937. This series of coloured engravings on wood is the most expensive and the most spectacular of his career: a tremendous technical achievement with morphing abstract and geometrical shapes and measuring 4 metres across. In October 2008, a lot of five engravings entitled Metamorphosis II (1940) doubled its high estimation at Sotheby’s London for a winning bid of £115,000 ($204,600), a record for the artist, half of whose works sell for less than $7,300 and only 20% of whose results go beyond $15,000. With the rising prices of certain prints from the era, those less concerned by the quality of a historical work and more interested in the image itself can acquire limited edition copies, duly numbered and stamped from the Escher Foundation in Baarn, Holland.

Escher’s market has remained healthy and affordable as it consists almost exclusively of prints (96%). Of course, the print is a perfect ‘democratic’ artistic medium, since it is a multiple that can be produced in series (more or less limited) and therefore distributed to a wide audience. However, that hasn’t prevented a number of recent auction battles for some of the rare prints in good condition such as Beetles (Scarabeeën), an engraving on un-matured and wood (1935, 18 x 24cm) and naturalist. Rarely seen at auction, Scarabeeën is a particularly interesting and valuable piece because it carries the seeds of Escher’s taste for contrary movements and games of construction that became such a dominant feature of the artist’s work the following year. Estimated at €7,000 in May 2009, the two Beetles and their dung balls pushed the bidding to €17,000 at Bubb Kuyper (c. $23,600) in Haarlem. The same insects sold for €1,400 ($1,650) at an auction on 26 May 1993 at Christie’s in Amsterdam.

Past master in the art of outwitting the third dimension on paper, Escher also produced a number of sculptures, generally in resin or metal. Although the price of these small objects appears to have doubled in 2010, they remain reasonably affordable. One would expect to pay between $1,200 and $2,000 to acquire a Sphere with fish, an agglomeration of fish produced in a limited edition of 500 and which were valued at roughly $350 to $800 at the beginning of the 2000s.