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Beating piteously at the windows for New Scientist<\/em>,\u00a025 May 2018<\/a><\/p>\n Leeuwarden-Fryslan, one of the less populated parts of the Netherlands, has been designated this year\u2019s European Capital of Culture. It\u2019s a hub of social and technological and cultural innovation and yet hardly anyone has heard of the place. It makes batteries that the makers claim run circles around Tesla\u2019s current technology, there are advanced plans for the region to go fossil free by 2025, it has one of the highest (and happiest) immigrant populations in Europe, and yet all we can see from the minibus, from horizon to horizon, is cows.<\/p>\n When you\u2019re invited to write about an area you know nothing about, a good place to start is the heritage. But even that can\u2019t help us here. The tiny city of Leeuwarden boasts three hugely famous children: spy and exotic dancer Mata Hari, astrophysicist Jan Hendrik Oort (he of the Oort Cloud) and puzzle-minded artist Maurits Cornelis Escher. The trouble is, all three are famous for being maddening eccentrics.<\/p>\n All Leeuwarden\u2019s poor publicists can do then, having brought us here, is throw everything at us and hope something sticks. And so it happens that, somewhere between the (world-leading) Princessehof ceramics museum and Lan Fan Taal, a permanent pavilion celebrating world languages, someone somewhere makes a small logistical error and locks me inside an M C Escher exhibition.<\/p>\n Escher, who died in 1972, is famous for using mathematical ideas in his art, drawing on concepts from symmetry and hyperbolic geometry to create complex tessellated images. And the Fries Museum in Leeuwarden has gathered more than 80 original prints for me to explore, along with drawings, photographs and memorabilia, so there is no possibility of my getting bored.<\/p>\n Nor is the current exhibition, Escher\u2019s Journey, the usual, chilly celebration of the man\u2019s puzzle-making ability and mathematical sixth sense. Escher was a pleasant, passionate man with a taste for travel, and this show reveals how his personal experiences shaped his art.<\/p>\n Escher\u2019s childhood was by his own account a happy one. His parents took a good deal of interest in his education without ever restricting his intellectual freedom. This was as well, since he was useless at school. Towards the end of his studies, he and his parents traveled through France to Italy, and in Florence he wrote to a friend: \u201cI wallow in it, but so greedily that I fear that my stomach will not be able to withstand it.\u201d<\/p>\n The cultural feast afforded by the city was the least of it. The Leeuwarden native was equally staggered by the surrounding hills \u2013 the sheer, three-dimensional fact of them; the rocky coasts and craggy defiles; the huddled mountain villages with squares, towers and houses with sloping roofs. Escher\u2019s love of the Italian landscape consumed him and, much to his mother\u2019s dismay, he was soon permanently settled in the country.<\/p>\n For visitors familiar to the point of satiety and beyond with Escher\u2019s endlessly reproduced and commodified architectural puzzles and animal tessellations, the sketches he made in Italy during the 1920s and 1930s are the highlight of this show. Escher\u2019s favored medium was the engraving. It\u2019s a time-consuming art, and one that affords the artist time to think and to tinker. Inevitably, Escher began merging his sketches into new, realistic wholes. Soon he was trying out unusual perspectives and image compilations. In Still Life with Mirror (1934), he crossed the threshold, creating a reflected world that proves on close inspection to be physically and mathematically impossible.<\/p>\n The usual charge against Escher as an artist \u2013 that he was too caught up in the toils of his own visual imagination to express much humanity \u2013 is hard to rebuff. There\u2019s a gap here it\u2019s not so easy to bridge: between Escher the approachable and warm-hearted family man and Escher the grumpy Parnassian (he once sent Mick Jagger away with a flea in his ear for asking him for an album cover).<\/p>\n The second world war had a lot to answer for, of course, not least because it drove Escher out of his beloved Italian hills and back, via Switzerland, to the flat old, dull old Netherlands. \u201cItaly, the landscape, the people, they speak to me.\u201d he explained in 1968. \u201cSwitzerland doesn\u2019t and Holland even less so.\u201d<\/p>\n Without the landscape to inform his art, other influences came to dominate. Among the places he had visited as war gathered was the Alhambra in Granada. The complex geometric patterns covering its every surface, and their timeless, endless repetition, fascinated him. For days on end he copied the Arab motifs in the palace. Back in the Netherlands, their influence, and Escher\u2019s growing fascination with the mathematics of tessellation, would draw him away from landscapes toward an art consisting entirely of \u201cvisualised thoughts\u201d.<\/p>\n By the time his images were based on periodic tilings (meaning that you can slide a pattern in a certain direction and have it exactly overlay the original), his commentaries suggest that Escher had come to embrace his own, somewhat sterile reputation. \u201cI played a game,\u201d he recalled, \u201cindulged in imaginary thoughts, with no other intention than to explore the possibilities of representation. In my work I give a report on these discoveries.\u201d<\/p>\n In the end Escher\u2019s designs became so fiendishly complex, his output dropped almost to zero, and much of his time was taken up lecturing and corresponding about his unique way of working. He corresponded with mathematicians, though he never considered himself one. He knew Roger Penrose. He lived to see the first fractal shapes evolve out of the mathematical studies of Koch and Mandelbrot, though it wasn\u2019t until after his death that Beno\u00eet Mandelbrot coined the word \u201cfractal\u201d and popularised the concept.<\/p>\n Eventually, I am missed. At any rate, someone thinks to open the gallery door. I don\u2019t know how long I was in there, locked in close proximity to my childhood hero. (Yes, as a child I did those jigsaw puzzles; yes, as a student I had those posters on my wall) I can\u2019t have been left inside Escher\u2019s Journey for more than a few minutes. But I exited a wreck.<\/p>\n The Fries Museum has lit Escher\u2019s works using some very subtle and precise spot projection; this and the trompe-l\u2019\u0153il monochrome paintwork on the walls of the gallery form a modestly Escherine puzzle all by themselves. Purely from the perspective of exhibition design, this charming, illuminating, and comprehensive show is well worth a visit.<\/p>\n You wouldn\u2019t want to live there, though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Beating piteously at the windows for New Scientist,\u00a025 May 2018 Leeuwarden-Fryslan, one of the less populated parts of the Netherlands, has been designated this year\u2019s European Capital of Culture. It\u2019s a hub of social and technological and cultural innovation and … Continue reading