In 1967 Graham Nash tracked down M.C. Escher’s phone number and rang him up to tell him how his art had changed his life. The Dutchman was nonplussed, and the singer was startled when he declared: “I’m not an artist. I’m a mathematician.”
As one of the few non-family members interviewed for Robin Lutz’s documentary M.C. Escher: Journey to Infinity, Nash stands in for the Countercultural generation that embraced Escher’s vision-shifting work. The Dutch (non)artist was clearly flummoxed by the hippies and couldn’t fathom what they saw in his drawings. He had no idea why his (non)art became the travel companion for trips across the world.
Journey to Infinity is narrated by Stephen Fry, reading from Escher’s letters and journals in a theatrical voice that threatens to distract from the words themselves. It’s a minor tic in an enjoyable film that sketches out Escher’s life in broad strokes. He came from a family of engineers yet, never entirely comfortable, studied architecture and turned to decorative arts in college. Fry quotes from an Escher letter: “I hover between mathematics and art.”
While living in Italy during the 1920s, Escher became intrigued by the staked, terraced cubes of the country’s old urban architecture. Visiting the Alhambra, he was fascinated by the abstract patterns of the Moorish palace’s tile floors and walls. But contrary to Modernism’s rising tide, Escher wasn’t interested in abstraction for its own sake but wanted to represent the world of human and animals inside visual systems that suggest quantum fractals and the curvature of time and space.
Escher described his work as a solution to “the problem of expressing endlessness within a limited plane.” His two-dimensional drawings visualize our existence on a three-dimensional plane with widows and doors opening to beyond. One door leads to mathematics where numbers are innumerable. Escher had a receptivity to wonder; his awareness of the infinite variations of reality positioned him as an unwitting psychedelic pioneer. And yet he had no interest in the colorful decade of the ‘60s as it blossomed around him. When Mick Jagger offered to commission him to draw a cover for a Rolling Stones’ album, he dashed off a curt reply: No.
M.C. Escher: A Journey to Infinity is out on a Kino Lorber Blu-ray.
