Selects: MC Escher and His Trippy Art

We love us some MC Escher. Turns out his story is pretty fascinating too. Tune in to this classic episode and find out all about it with Josh and Chuck.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, everybody. Chuck here on a Saturday. I'm just sitting
here drawing cubes and things with my poor artwork. But
you know who was really good at this? Mc Esher
And this episode from December twenty nineteen gets all into
the life of the great artist. And the title is
mc esher and his Trippy Art. I hope you enjoy it.

(00:24):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:33):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

Speaker 3 (00:35):
I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W Chuck Bryant, and
there's Jerry over there, and this is Stuff you Should Know.

Speaker 2 (00:40):
The Arts Sea.

Speaker 1 (00:42):
Edition is Jerry Roomtone. Roland.

Speaker 2 (00:45):
Yeah, I think that's make believe stuff.

Speaker 1 (00:49):
Room tone.

Speaker 2 (00:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (00:50):
She might as well be like, let me capture a
few fairies in this, Mason jow First.

Speaker 2 (00:54):
I think it's the same thing.

Speaker 1 (00:55):
We may need us in the final edit. Perry, I
don't know what it is about to explain to everyone.
Room tone is you do this on film sets and
in studios where you just make everyone sit completely silently
while you capture the sound of the room. So I
guess you can. What do you do with that, Joe?
Do you layer it in in case you need it
or something. Did you hear that? Everyone?

Speaker 3 (01:16):
She said, she cleans up the background to everybody listening.
It sounded like.

Speaker 1 (01:23):
There's something about it. Though. It's like being in church
and getting the giggles. Like it's really hard, especially on
a film set when there's like fifty people standing around
being completely silent.

Speaker 3 (01:32):
I suspect it's strictly a power trip, you think, So
the person calling for a room tone, that's what I think.

Speaker 1 (01:38):
I'm going to start doing that my house when things
get out of hand room tone?

Speaker 2 (01:42):
Do you think that works?

Speaker 3 (01:43):
Don't make me bust out the room tone on you? Well,
since this no, no, I was going to say, since
we're talking about room tone, obviously, the topic today is
mc escher, who is well known for going berserk anytime
someone asked him to be quiet for room tone, trash chairs,
grab reptiles straight out of the two dimensions and throw

(02:05):
them into the third dimension, just do all sorts of weird.

Speaker 1 (02:07):
Stuff that's funny.

Speaker 2 (02:09):
Did you think so that was a joke just for you?

Speaker 1 (02:12):
Yeah? So he everyone knows mc es or. If you've
ever been to college or taken drugs.

Speaker 2 (02:18):
Or sold drugs to somebody in college.

Speaker 1 (02:21):
Then you've probably seen hands drawing hands or I mean,
that's not what the name of that one.

Speaker 2 (02:27):
Was, but it's called drawing hands, oh is it?

Speaker 1 (02:30):
Or the Some of his more famous ones are the
these impossible rooms like stairs that lead to sideway stairs
but you got to wrap your head around it in
a certain way to even make sense of it, all.

Speaker 3 (02:42):
Right, or stairs that lead into other stairs that lead
back into the other stairs.

Speaker 2 (02:46):
Sure this is constant.

Speaker 1 (02:48):
Or I'm a big fan of that one self portrait
he did in the with the sphere. Yeah, the mirror sphere,
mirror sphere.

Speaker 2 (02:54):
Yeah, it's cool, it is very cool.

Speaker 3 (02:56):
I'm not crazy about the face, even though I'm sure
he did it exactly precise, but the hand, if you
look at the hand, it's really realistic.

Speaker 2 (03:05):
It's very pretty.

Speaker 1 (03:06):
Yeah, I mean I like this stuff. This is not
my style, as in anything I would put on my
walls these days, but I still think he's one of
the coolest, more innovative artists out there.

Speaker 2 (03:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (03:18):
And there's a great factoid that I hope will hold
till the end, which not the end but kind of
where it falls in our So what an outline?

Speaker 3 (03:27):
What does factoid mean against I mean you've killed ten
percent of all the facts, that's right, and this is
just one of the ten percent remaining.

Speaker 1 (03:33):
That's right.

Speaker 2 (03:33):
Okay, gotcha. So one of the things you chuck about MC.

Speaker 3 (03:39):
I sure that I found was that if you were
impressed by his work, prepared to get exponentially more impressed
as we talk about how he made those works. Well too,
that's the fact of the show too for me. Oh okay,
that's the factoid you.

Speaker 1 (03:51):
Yeah, you got a hold onto that.

Speaker 3 (03:52):
Oh sure, sure, sure sure. I was just teasing it
a little bit. I didn't know that's what you're talking about,
although I should have guessed. Yeah. So this is a
talking about an artist, which means that we should probably
talk about the artist being born. And in the case
of MC Escher, whose name, by the way, was Moritz Cornelis,

(04:14):
I want to say Cornelius, but there's no U in there.

Speaker 1 (04:16):
I think Cornelis.

Speaker 3 (04:17):
Sure Esher, I nailed the last nurme. That's right, But
I misspoke on name.

Speaker 1 (04:24):
Oh you didn't say the name nrme.

Speaker 2 (04:27):
So I nailed the last nurme.

Speaker 3 (04:29):
This is the point where the people say, get to
the point already.

Speaker 1 (04:32):
Well we are at that point. That's MC and then
Esher born June seventeenth, eighteen ninety eight, not nineteen eighty nine,
as the Grabster put it. Yeah, it was like, man,
he's like, here's the numbers. He was born in leu Warden, Netherlands,
grew up in Arnheim, which is about sixty miles southeast

(04:55):
of Amsterdam.

Speaker 2 (04:56):
Is that right?

Speaker 1 (04:57):
Yeah? Okay, I mapped all this stuff out nice, kind
of that general area.

Speaker 2 (05:01):
He went on a little Google tour.

Speaker 1 (05:03):
Sure, and he signed even from early on as MCE
he signed his paintings, although people called him mock m
a UK friends and family.

Speaker 3 (05:14):
Right, which didn't mean anything, Ed points out. But it's
just like, you know, an affectionate term for Moritz. Yeah,
is it Mouritz?

Speaker 1 (05:23):
Probably Maritz Maurites, cornelis Escher, but.

Speaker 2 (05:26):
It could also go the way of Morris. So is
it Moritz or more?

Speaker 1 (05:30):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (05:31):
I wish I knew.

Speaker 1 (05:33):
Well. What we do know is that in this we
should put a pin in because it sort of plays
a big part in how he pursued his art. But
his dad had some money.

Speaker 2 (05:43):
He was a rich kid, yeah for sure.

Speaker 1 (05:45):
Which really helps. As we'll see as he's trapesing around Europe.

Speaker 3 (05:49):
On dad's dime, slowly getting better at art slowly.

Speaker 1 (05:55):
Yeah, that's a good point, because he was not great
in school. He did love drawing class, but apparently wasn't
you know, he didn't have his second grade teachers falling
over themselves about what a talented artist he was.

Speaker 3 (06:08):
No, and apparently he also didn't consider himself much of
an artist, although he engaged in art like he did
produce art from a very young age. He was terrible
in school, except at math and at drawing. Apparently when
he was in grade school primary school he failed as finals,
all of them except for math. And I read that
his father noted in his journal with some affection that

(06:32):
his son consoled himself by producing a lina type of
a sunflower. That's how he made himself feel better after
failing out of school.

Speaker 1 (06:42):
Well, and he was somewhat adept at math early on.
But it's interesting his work is highly mathematical as far
as art goes, but later on in life, when he
was confronted with real mathematicians, he would sort of be like, no,
not me, man, I'm an artist. Well, I'm not that
kind of mathematician.

Speaker 3 (07:02):
So I said yes. But he was most of his
friends were mathematicians. For most of his career, he was
mostly appreciated by mathematicians and scientists. Those are the people
who really vibed on his work and drugs that came later.
That came later, and he got real popular. But I
saw that somebody made a movie called Journey into Infinity documentary,

(07:25):
full length documentary.

Speaker 2 (07:26):
I believe the whole.

Speaker 3 (07:26):
Thing's on YouTube, and it starts out.

Speaker 2 (07:30):
The trailer starts out with.

Speaker 3 (07:31):
Graham Nash saying, Hey, I called up mc esher one
day just to say, mister Esher, I think you're a
really great artist. That's all I wanted you to say.
And he said, I don't consider myself an artist. I
consider myself a mathematician. Oh really, yes, So I'm going
with Graham Nash's interpretation as counter to this spoke to

(07:52):
him directly.

Speaker 1 (07:52):
Yeah, yeah, I mean it's crazy. He I mean, not
to spoil anything, but he died in nineteen seventy two
at just seventy three. So you know, if he would
have lived to his like mid eighties, which is somewhat reasonable,
he would have been like alive in the eighties, which
just seems so weird.

Speaker 3 (08:11):
It does seem kind of weird, you know, yeah, because
he was. He seems countercultural for sure, even though him
his personality was not very countercultural. No, and he didn't
really have much love for hippies. In fact, he later
said that the hippies in San Francisco are legally making
copies of my work. He didn't exactly follow, you know,

(08:35):
the normal usual beat throughout his lifetime. And he was
a mathematician. He was a bit of a square, but
he was also a very imaginative square.

Speaker 1 (08:44):
That's right. I was trying to make a square joke,
but it's not coming to me.

Speaker 2 (08:50):
Remember that show, Square peg, square peg, square, yeah, square peg.

Speaker 3 (08:54):
Sarah Jesica Parker was she in that. She was also
in Girls Just Want to Have Fun, That's right.

Speaker 1 (09:00):
Yeah, And I'm going to see her on Broadway next spring.
Really yeah. She and her husband are co starring in
Plaza Suite and Neil Simon's Plaza Sweet. Very nice, very
excited about that. But I'm trying to align it with
a Bonnie Prince Billy show. But they're like a week apart,
and I'm like, I can't just stay in New York.

Speaker 3 (09:19):
Time to kill, especially when there's hourly flights between Atlanta
and New York.

Speaker 1 (09:23):
I know, I may just go see Bonnie Prince Billy
and come home because he didn't play much. But that's
a story for another day, all right. So he goes
to school at Technical College of Delft, not for very long,
and then he went to the Harlem with two A's
School of Architecture and Decorative Arts, which is west of Amsterdam,

(09:45):
not Harlem, New York.

Speaker 3 (09:46):
Well, I think that's what the Harlem, New York is
named after. Right, Yeah, that's where Bonnie Prince.

Speaker 1 (09:52):
He's at town Hall.

Speaker 2 (09:53):
Actually, Oh is that right? Yeah, we played there.

Speaker 1 (09:55):
That's right. We got our stink on that joint. So
his dad said, you know, because you know, his dad
had a lot of money and made money, and even
though you want to support your kids, you want you
want to try and edge them into something. Sure, if
you're that kind of dude, that might be lucrative. So
he said, hey, you like to draw shapes, why don't
you go study architecture. And he did that for a

(10:17):
little while, even though he wasn't super into it. But
while at school there he had a very fortunate meeting
by being mentored by one Samuel Jasurin Demisquita m.

Speaker 3 (10:29):
Who would be his mentor, who noticed some of his
early art. I'm not sure how he saw it, but
he took one look at Esher's art and said, you
don't need to go into architecture. Come study under me
and learn graphic design. And so Escher did. He became
a graphic designer, which he whether he knew it or not,
he had been his whole life up to that point.

(10:49):
All of his work is very graphic in nature and designing.

Speaker 2 (10:54):
Yeah, it really really is.

Speaker 1 (10:55):
But I'm sure his dad in the early, you know,
nineteen twenties was probably like, is that even a thing, right?

Speaker 2 (11:01):
That sounds made up?

Speaker 1 (11:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (11:03):
Well, his dad also, I don't know if you said
or not, was a civil engineer, so of course he
would be like, you draw, just go do architecture, right,
that's what I know, civil engineering, and there's architects in
the world. Just go do the other thing that I
don't do.

Speaker 1 (11:14):
And he probably thought graphic design just meant like you're
gonna make signs.

Speaker 3 (11:19):
Right or post his stamps or Christmas paper, which he
did later on.

Speaker 1 (11:22):
That's right, until he made a little bit of dough.
So in the early nineteen twenties, he started on his
sort of rich kid journey, traveling around Europe on his
dad's dime.

Speaker 2 (11:35):
On a gap year that was really really long.

Speaker 1 (11:37):
Very long. But on one of these trips he went
to a couple of places that would end up having
a big influence on him. Yeah, one in Spain at
the Alhambra, and then just traveling through southern Italy through
the countryside.

Speaker 2 (11:51):
Yeah, he just fell in love with Italy.

Speaker 1 (11:53):
Yeah, but in Spain this is this is one that
didn't bear fruit right away, but he was really fascinated
by these mosaics and tesselations, which are described as.

Speaker 3 (12:06):
Okay, they are repeating designs that interlock with one another,
leave no space between one another, and that when you
fit them together they fully cover a plane, which is
harder to do than you would think.

Speaker 1 (12:20):
Yeah, Like, if you've ever seen the esher fish sort
of tesselation.

Speaker 3 (12:25):
The whitefish and the blackfish kind of working in one another.

Speaker 1 (12:29):
Yeah, that's a perfect example. And he would do this
a lot later on. If you've ever played Cubert, Yeah,
those cubes are tesselations, sure, a certain kind. But he
got really into this, even though it wasn't like right
away that he started doing these things that sort of
came a little bit later. But what he did do
was started drawing the Italian countryside because he loved it.

Speaker 2 (12:52):
Loved it, I mean, like he went to Italy, he
was like, this is my home.

Speaker 1 (12:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (12:56):
And he was quoted at one point in time as
saying like he never wanted to be an Italian among Italians.
He liked being a stranger, but he loved Italy, which.

Speaker 1 (13:06):
Is an interesting thing to say. I'm not exactly sure
what it means.

Speaker 3 (13:08):
I think what he was saying was he he likes
being a visitor to Italy rather than there's a certain
amount of responsibility that comes with being one of us,
you know what I mean. Whereas if you can be
like that guy over there, who will accept him. We're
not going to throw rocks at him every time we
see him or anything like that, and we'll take his
money and you know, maybe even say hi.

Speaker 2 (13:30):
To him or whatever, but we'll leave him alone.

Speaker 3 (13:32):
We won't include him in our expectations of what it
means to be a local. Gotcha, That's what I think
he was after. Clearly I can identify with that.

Speaker 1 (13:41):
Well. That kind of came through in his work too,
because if you'll notice even in these, before he started
doing the like trippy three dimensional handstrawing hands and stuff,
when he was doing countrysides, he didn't do a lot
of people, didn't do a lot of faces. People were
very much in the background and nondescript. But even when
you look at these, when you say Italian still lives

(14:03):
of countrysides, what came to mind for me were these beautiful, lush,
colorful recreations of a countryside. Nope, Nope, when you look
at these, they still look very much like in the
mc escher style that we all know.

Speaker 2 (14:16):
Yeah, like very clearly. A lot of love them too.

Speaker 1 (14:18):
They're cool.

Speaker 2 (14:19):
Yeah, they're beautiful.

Speaker 3 (14:20):
Yeah, they're black and white and then shades of gray,
which is all just shading, right, Yeah, but they are
beautiful in their way and lovely.

Speaker 1 (14:27):
Even I like this stuff more than the trippy stuff.
Oh yeah, yeah, I mean this is something I would
put on my wall.

Speaker 3 (14:33):
You're an art snob, You're like, oh, I only like
Esher's early Italian landscapes.

Speaker 2 (14:39):
Oh man, you take that, say the trippy stuff for
Graham Nash.

Speaker 1 (14:42):
I'm so ashamed.

Speaker 2 (14:43):
No, I think it's great, Chuck. You you have.

Speaker 1 (14:46):
Totally right but they are gorgeous. And then in nineteen
twenty three he met his wife.

Speaker 2 (14:54):
His name was Jetta jedda Umaker.

Speaker 1 (14:57):
That's right, very nice, thank you.

Speaker 2 (14:58):
She was learned from the.

Speaker 1 (15:01):
They met her in Italy, but she was Swiss and
she went home and they sent a bunch of love letters.
It's a very sweet story. I'm sure an mcacsher movie
would be pretty cool.

Speaker 3 (15:11):
Somebody wrote a script or they wrote a dissertation about
the process of writing a script about mc esher. It's
from University of Texas. I wrote it in twenty seventeen.
I can't remember the name of it. But just look up. Oh,
just some random stuff comes up if you look up
mosquito bootprint, which will come up later. But if you

(15:32):
search that on Google, it brings up Have you ever
done that? Have you ever been like, I'm bored. I
want to see what weird stuff I can unlock from Google.
And it takes a certain amount of skill because Google
wants to give you exactly what you're looking for. It
doesn't want to give you just randomness, so you have
to trick it. So maybe you'll you'll type in a
weird word or the first three letters of a word

(15:55):
or something like that, and weird stuff will start to come.
Well if you type in mosquito. Probably only like the
first three of them pertained to m cescher and the
rest are just a random assortment of links.

Speaker 1 (16:07):
I remember, early in the days of Google, we had
a mutual friend who they did this what I thought
was a very dumb game where they would try and
find two words together that they would try and produce
the fewest amount of Google results. And whoever could put
two words together that found the fewest one. Yeah, And
I don't know if you remember them doing that, but

(16:28):
so I don't know. I don't remember you talking about
lost a waste of time.

Speaker 2 (16:31):
But I remember that some guy did, like a ted
talk about that.

Speaker 1 (16:34):
Oh really yeah, Oh well, maybe I'm the dummy.

Speaker 2 (16:36):
No, no, no, it was.

Speaker 1 (16:38):
I mean, look at me. I'd like mcsher's early work.

Speaker 2 (16:42):
I think that's awesome. I mean, what taste. Yeah, you know.

Speaker 1 (16:46):
So he meets and gets married. She returns to Italy
and they married nineteen twenty four.

Speaker 2 (16:52):
Do you mean Jeda Umaker.

Speaker 1 (16:54):
That's right. She would become Jeda Esher.

Speaker 2 (16:57):
Jeda Umiker Esher, and.

Speaker 1 (16:59):
They had a son named Georgio. Later had sons, Arthur
and Jan and uh, they were still just sort of
traveling and his dad was even though he was married,
his dad was still footing the bill.

Speaker 3 (17:12):
Esher's dad father, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, which I was just
thinking about it. I was like, gosh, you know, I
get a benefactor. Wake up every day and look at
yourself in the mirror.

Speaker 1 (17:22):
But if you're if you're in the mirror sphere.

Speaker 2 (17:25):
Right, how do you and then how do you draw it?

Speaker 1 (17:27):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (17:28):
So amazingly the the father Esher's father though, and like,
what better way to spend your money than to just
be like, this is what you want to do with
your life, son, you want to pursue art and live
in beautiful Italy than like here, this is what I
want for you.

Speaker 1 (17:43):
And that's like, that's awesome.

Speaker 3 (17:46):
That's the pinnacle of what a parent can do for
their child in a lot of ways.

Speaker 1 (17:50):
No, totally know.

Speaker 3 (17:51):
It's not like, hey, why don't you go, you know,
take up Heroin and here's a bunch of money for
you to like lay around in a BEFA.

Speaker 1 (17:57):
True I want to know more. I'm not I hope
I'm not coming across his cynical but I wonder if
some of this was like, he'll come around if I
you know, to architecture or whatever.

Speaker 3 (18:08):
Right, you kept waiting for the part where his father
cuts him off. I was his father apparently wouldn't like that.
All right, I know how you feel. I'm not trying
to talk you into my way of thinking. I'm not
saying like I had. I started out thinking the same
way you did. And then something happened. I was like, Oh,
it was actually really neat of his dad.

Speaker 1 (18:24):
It was it all seems above board. Yeah. So World
War Two has a profound effect on Esher and his work.
In nineteen thirty five, he learned that they were making
his nine year old son, Georgio, marching fascist youth parades,
and he said, pack your bags, we're going to Switzerland.

Speaker 3 (18:43):
That is the appropriate response to that news. Yeah, we're
getting out of here marching for Mussolini.

Speaker 1 (18:49):
Have you seen Jojo Rabbit yet?

Speaker 2 (18:52):
No? Is it good? Is it as good as it looks?

Speaker 1 (18:54):
It's great?

Speaker 2 (18:55):
Oh, I can't wait.

Speaker 1 (18:56):
It's great. Everything about it is created.

Speaker 2 (18:58):
I need to see it in theater. It doesn't like
one I have to see any No.

Speaker 1 (19:01):
I mean, you know, it's always fun to laugh with
a big group of people, although by now it's probably
thinned out. Yeah, and I was laughing a lot and
people weren't laughing. Oh, I like that kind of one
of those deals. Yeah, I mean, it's a movie about
a kid having Hitler as an imaginary friend.

Speaker 2 (19:15):
So don't tell me that I didn't know. I know,
I had no idea Itler's on the poster. I know,
but I didn't know he was an imaginary friend. Oh,
get out of my brain.

Speaker 1 (19:25):
Sorry, that really doesn't spoil anything.

Speaker 2 (19:27):
Okay, like, don't tell me any not some big reveal.

Speaker 1 (19:31):
So they go to Switzerland. All apologies, it's really not a.

Speaker 2 (19:35):
Big deal as long as it's not a big spoiler.

Speaker 1 (19:37):
No, no, no, no, of course not.

Speaker 2 (19:38):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (19:39):
They go to Switzerland and he even though he did
not like the mountains, he didn't like the snow, did
not like cold weather. So they moved to Belgium after
a couple of years.

Speaker 2 (19:50):
Which is just beautiful compared to Switzerland.

Speaker 1 (19:53):
Belgium's nice sure in the nineteen In May of nineteen forty, though,
the Nazzis invaded Belgium, and so they moved to the
Netherlands in nineteen forty one.

Speaker 3 (20:03):
Where the Nazis already were. Yeah, I guess they really
can't occupy it again.

Speaker 1 (20:09):
Well in its home right, and they settled in Barn,
which is about twenty three miles southeast of Amsterdam.

Speaker 2 (20:16):
I don't know if that's how you're supposed to say it.

Speaker 1 (20:18):
B aa aaar inn, I like it's probably Barn.

Speaker 2 (20:25):
Oh yeah, I'll bet you just nailed it.

Speaker 1 (20:27):
I think so. But Dutchess very strange. It is language,
but it's supposed that's strange. But just for my English,
dumb English.

Speaker 2 (20:33):
Years, supposedly English is the strangest of all.

Speaker 1 (20:36):
Yeah, I'm sure it's just.

Speaker 2 (20:37):
A hybrid mongrel language.

Speaker 3 (20:40):
Yet that doesn't make any sense to anyone who's not
a native speaker of it.

Speaker 1 (20:44):
You know, what is an interesting language is Welsh. Because
I'm watching the Crown and when Prince Charles starts coming around,
Prince of Wales, there's people speaking Welsh. And I was
very ignorant about even knowing that what it sounds like,
what it sounds like, and that it was still spoken,
and it was a very odd hybrid. It sounded like
of several different things.

Speaker 2 (21:05):
It's all old Celtic stuff.

Speaker 1 (21:06):
Yeah, very unusual.

Speaker 3 (21:08):
Gallic, gallic, Yeah, I think it's Gallic. It's the language group,
one of the two.

Speaker 1 (21:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (21:13):
Everything I know about Welsh I learned from super furry animals.

Speaker 2 (21:17):
Oh yeah, because that guy's welsh Man.

Speaker 1 (21:19):
I saw them blood granddaddy off the stage one time.

Speaker 2 (21:22):
Oh you saw him live?

Speaker 1 (21:24):
Oh I think you told me that he melted. My
brain was so good all that. So they're traveling around still,
even though they're settled in Barn, and they go back
to al Hambra in Spain, which I don't think we
said what that is.

Speaker 3 (21:38):
No, it's a thirteenth century Moorish castle from when the
Moors conquered Spain.

Speaker 1 (21:43):
It's beautiful.

Speaker 2 (21:43):
It is very beautiful, and they.

Speaker 3 (21:45):
Built it in the Moorish style and then it was
eventually like taken over by the Christian like royalty that
explored the New World and all that stuff. Yeah, but
this castle was done in these tiles that are noun
for being some of the most beautiful geometric like Islamic

(22:05):
patterns you've ever seen in your life. And they got
to esher. He'd seen him before, but it was I
guess he was like, oh, that's kind of cool. But
the second trip that he went back with after they
moved from Switzerland. I think to Belgium or maybe to Switzerland.
That's when he was like, I am obsessed with these
Now these tessellations.

Speaker 1 (22:25):
Started drawing him. Jetted it too. It says that they
worked together. So I didn't know that she was an artist.

Speaker 2 (22:32):
Yeah, I didn't either.

Speaker 1 (22:34):
But they World War two comes back around, will not
comes back around. It never left, let's be honest. But
Spain would devolve into civil war. And so this meant
that he was kind of stuck in outside of Amsterdam
for a little while longer. Yeah, he wasn't doing as
much traveling.

Speaker 3 (22:53):
No, he was in the Netherlands and he rekindled his
friendship with Mosquita, his old mentor who had stayed in
Netherlands this whole time. And Mosquita was Jewish and he
was taken away by the Nazis. Eventually he was killed

(23:14):
at Auschwitz, I believe, with his wife and their son
was also killed at another concentration camp by the Nazis.
And this really got to esher, like, this is one
of his dear friends. And he had a work a
sketch of Mosquitos. When he went to his house to
visit Mosquito, he found the door was opened and they

(23:34):
weren't there, and they'd clearly been taken by the Nazis.
And one of the pieces of artwork that he gathered
together to preserve was a sketch of mosquitos that had
a Nazi bootprint on it.

Speaker 1 (23:44):
And that's what you were referenced earlier with your.

Speaker 2 (23:46):
Google search mosquito bootprint.

Speaker 1 (23:48):
Did you Was there a picture of it?

Speaker 2 (23:49):
No?

Speaker 3 (23:50):
I couldn't find anything aside from the fact that it
was a sketch, not that it was a sketch of
what or anything like that, just that there was a
sketch of mosquitos that had boor bootprint, and the Escher
hung onto this his his entire life. It was very
important to him.

Speaker 2 (24:05):
And he was not.

Speaker 3 (24:10):
A very flowery, like like passionate man or anything like that.
I get the impression that he and this is esture
I'm talking about, that he internalized a lot of stuff,
and I think that him holding on to that piece
of art was probably more significant than even it appears
on the outside.

Speaker 1 (24:31):
Yeah, and supposedly hid some people from a Jewish family
during the Nazi occupation years, and also during those same years,
did not exhibit or release any prints.

Speaker 3 (24:43):
Wait a minute, I think you just said hid some
people from a Jewish family, or did you say hid
some members of a Jewish family.

Speaker 1 (24:50):
Well, people members of a Jewish family.

Speaker 2 (24:52):
But you said from I think yeah.

Speaker 1 (24:54):
I mean like they were from a Jewish family.

Speaker 2 (24:56):
Oh oh, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha.

Speaker 1 (24:58):
He didn't hide them from right, don't.

Speaker 2 (25:01):
Tell the Jewish family that you're hiding over here.

Speaker 1 (25:03):
No, that would have been weird. So maybe we should
take a break now.

Speaker 2 (25:08):
Oh, I think it's unraveled for the point the guys
are yeah.

Speaker 3 (25:11):
All right, okay, Chuck. So World War two kind of

(25:36):
comes and goes around esher despite his best efforts to
escape it, and it definitely had a mark on him.
But one of the other things that that had a
really big mark on him was having to move from
Italy because, like you said, like he was married, had
a family, his father was still supporting him, and every
spring and summer he would just tour the Italian countryside

(25:57):
and visit small quaint towns be inspired to keep making
these Italian landscapes. But Ed makes a really great point
here that his Italian landscapes are very handsome works of art,
very beautiful, my favorite, technically proficient. They're Chuck's favorite. But
you would almost certainly have never seen them in your
entire life now were it not for him moving from Italy,

(26:20):
because in doing so he lost his source of inspiration
and was forced to kind of turn inward because he
hated what Switzerland looked like. He wasn't apparently very inspired
by his home country of the Netherlands, so he had
to kind of turn inward into his own imagination and
start coming up with new subjects, and in doing that,
the true Escher was unlocked.

Speaker 1 (26:42):
Yeah, because early and like a lot of artists early
in their career, they kind of free ranged through different styles,
trying to find their own personal thing.

Speaker 3 (26:52):
He had a very very colorful clown period. It's very bizarre.
Doesn't fit with the rest of it.

Speaker 1 (26:58):
Arry, John Wayne Gacy, You're right, but you can very
clearly see if you look at Mosquito's work that connection
and the influence from him. Although Mosquita did a lot
of sort of graphic portraits and things like that, whereas
Esher didn't really worry too much about humans and faces.

Speaker 3 (27:16):
Yeah, yeah, they were just kind of like almost afterthoughts.

Speaker 1 (27:20):
But early on he did start experimenting with stuff that
would later become sort of his hallmark. When he did
do a sketch of a building, let's say it would
be from this really like tall odd angle looking down
on it, very severe angles and like a horizon, or

(27:41):
trees that sort of go on into infinity. Stuff like that,
that would become very much his style. Later on, and
ed Various Stuteley points out that there's something about his
style that I don't know how dark of a person
he was emotionally, but there is something about the severity
of these angles and a lot of his work that
was just sort of uneasy feeling, right. It didn't look

(28:06):
like just some beautiful, colorful Italian countryside. There was something
kind of strange and unusual about it.

Speaker 3 (28:14):
Something about the contrast of black and white definitely does
it too. And he was such a master of shading
that if something was stark and black and white, I mean,
unless it was his earliest work, was because he wanted
it to look that way and to make it stark
and kind of unsettling like that. But yeah, there's like
a certain amount of dread in a lot of his stuff. Yeah,

(28:36):
and it's not something you can easily put your finger on,
but it's definitely there.

Speaker 1 (28:40):
Yeah, like did you see the mummified priests? Yeah, that
was creepy and then one of them.

Speaker 2 (28:47):
Isn't it more creepy to actually do that in real
life to stand them up like that? And these little alcoves?

Speaker 1 (28:54):
Oh? Yeah, absolutely sure.

Speaker 2 (28:55):
He was just don't kill the messenger.

Speaker 1 (28:58):
And he would have sometimes skulls featured in some of
his work and stuff like that, like the one of
the eye believe called eye right in the middle of
the people is a skull staring back. So he had
little touches like that without going full like you know,
love Craftian.

Speaker 2 (29:16):
Right or Goya or something like that.

Speaker 1 (29:18):
And I don't even know, Bosh, I don't know who
that is.

Speaker 2 (29:21):
Sure you do, I'm just kidding, Okay, I know those people. Okay, So.

Speaker 1 (29:27):
His I guess this is where we get to the
fact of the show for me. Take it away, Chuck,
because folks, if you've ever seen an mcsher print and
you thought, man, that guy could sure draw a print,
imagine cutting that out of wood in reverse, in reverse.

Speaker 3 (29:44):
Because that's what he did. A lot of his stuff
were wood cuts. Even harder than that, Chuck, is the lithograph.

Speaker 1 (29:51):
Yeah, so a woodcut if you've ever made used a
stamp or made a potato stamp as your kid.

Speaker 2 (29:58):
You're basically.

Speaker 1 (30:00):
Well, that's what it is. He's actually carving the stuff
into wood as a negative image, because then when you
run ink over it and stamp it, you get the
positive image. And it's just incredible. I mean, it's hard
enough to draw and sketch this stuff, much less cut
it out of wood.

Speaker 3 (30:15):
Right, So just take a step back and think about
the eshers that you've seen before. Imagine that they were
originally carved out of wood, and now imagine that to
get even more detailing. Because you can't adjust how much
ink a certain part of the woodblock gets. It's all
going to get an even layer of ink. So to
shade something you have to do cross hatching, lines, stippling

(30:37):
something like that. But to get really detailed with shading,
you need multiple blocks of the same image in the
exact same size, with different parts accentuated so that you
can layer over. You can take the same paper and
layer them on different blocks and line them up so
that you have layers to this image. That was the

(31:00):
level of the woodcuts this guy was doing.

Speaker 1 (31:03):
Yeah, like that's sort of like a T shirt hippie exactly.
Screen printing, like a four color shirt. You gotta layer,
you gotta put it on exactly in the in the
spot that it needs to go each time drag that
inc across so it's not you know, off by a
centimeter right, because it would look bad.

Speaker 3 (31:21):
So the woodcuts, especially as earlier woodcuts, you can tell
their woodcuts.

Speaker 2 (31:26):
They look like woodcuts. Some of them do not.

Speaker 3 (31:29):
There's some of the Italian countryside that favorites are just yeah,
are just astounding. And when you stop and think about
the idea that they there's not a drawing that there
wood cuts, multiple blocked woodcuts, is pretty astounding. But like
I was saying to me, even even more difficult is
making the lithograph. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (31:51):
I think I talked about this on some other episode.
I know it talked about batikuing, but I also talked
to in industrial arts. We did of lithography in that
social experiment high school. Yeah, exactly, we did offset lithography,
which basically, I mean that's the process today. I mean,
that's how they make newspapers, posters, books, maps, kind of

(32:13):
everything is with offset lithography.

Speaker 3 (32:16):
It was in do you remember it was in the
etch A sketch episode. Oh that's what Ohio Art originally
did was lithography.

Speaker 1 (32:24):
Okay, well this is this is pre like today, use
like aluminum or some other kind of metal sheet and
these emulsions and chemicals. Back then it was drawn onto limestone,
a flat slab of limestone with a grease pencil, and
then use a chemical treatment on the areas that basically

(32:47):
water and ink don't mix. It's sort of all built
on that principle. So the areas where you have written
in Greece do not hold that ink or is it
the other way around?

Speaker 2 (32:57):
No, I think they don't hold the a.

Speaker 1 (32:59):
Yeah. Again, what you're doing is creating a negative image,
just like the woodcut essentially.

Speaker 3 (33:03):
Right, So you've got this attraction and repulsion interplay between ink,
water and grease, and when you put it all together
on limestone, it makes these extremely subtle gradients of shading
that are kind of like a hallmark of some of

(33:26):
Esher's more well known works. Yeah, the hands drawing hands, right, Yeah,
that was a lithograph. He made that with limestone and
grease pen and ink, and did it in reverse too,
because just like with a woodblock, you have to create
the negative of it, Yah, because you want the positive

(33:46):
image on the paper.

Speaker 1 (33:47):
You have a very special brain if this is if
you can work this stuff out as an artist. Yes,
you know, it's not saying that any kind of artist
is any better or worse or smarter than the next.
But your brain just has to be wired a little
bit differently to thinking negatives.

Speaker 3 (34:04):
Like that, like a mathematician. Basically, yeah, your brain has
to be set up that way.

Speaker 1 (34:08):
Yeah, absolutely, But lithography is difficult, very labor intensive. So
later on he would hire a lithographer to actually create
his prints after he's sketched and drawn the stuff out.
Smart move, And he would destroy the limestone. Well, he
wouldn't destroy it, he would scrape it clean so we
could reuse it. So that's the reason. Like if you

(34:28):
want to buy an original mc escher, good luck.

Speaker 3 (34:32):
Well there's no such thing. There's original prints that he made,
right And apparently you're.

Speaker 1 (34:36):
Not going to get your hands one of those limestones.

Speaker 3 (34:38):
No, but there are a couple of those left over.
But he said that he wanted him. I think canceled
is what they call it in his will right where
they intentionally damage it so that even if you got
a hold of one of these things, and you were like, I'm.

Speaker 2 (34:52):
Going to print me a brain new Esher.

Speaker 3 (34:54):
There'd be like the like the negative image of Snegel
Puss like comes through the hand drawing hands picture.

Speaker 1 (35:03):
And he did not do many original prints from those
original woodcuts and lithographs either. I think he only did
ten of still life with spherical mirror, and so anything, obviously,
anything you'd buy in a Spencer Gifts is going to
be a print anyway.

Speaker 2 (35:19):
What they told me it was an original.

Speaker 1 (35:23):
You mean bikini lady on Corvette.

Speaker 2 (35:26):
You can probably get the original of that at Spencer.

Speaker 1 (35:28):
Probably could the original negative.

Speaker 2 (35:31):
Bikini lady on Corvette. Man remember that Starfield with Lamborghini.

Speaker 1 (35:37):
These lithographs, he would also layer those just like you
did with the woodcuts, creating multiple plates to layer on
top of one another for shading and toning and stuff
like that. It's just amazing. I mean I did it
to make a Monkey's T shirt.

Speaker 2 (35:51):
I forgot used to screenprint too, so did.

Speaker 1 (35:53):
I Yeah, yeah, well actually the Monkeys T shirt was
screen printing. I think can remember what I did for
a lithograph. I think something to make a notepad that
said like my name and something else.

Speaker 3 (36:05):
Oh that's right. So you you screenprinted in industrial arts? Yes, okay,
like you were you ever employed gainfully as a screen Oh? No?

Speaker 2 (36:14):
Oh no?

Speaker 1 (36:14):
Did you do that?

Speaker 2 (36:15):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (36:15):
No, I mean I would have loved to it. I
wasn't good enough.

Speaker 2 (36:18):
It's always not hard.

Speaker 1 (36:19):
Yeah, but you would draw the stuff or you would.

Speaker 3 (36:21):
No, no, no, no, I would like burn the screens and
everything and drag the ink through.

Speaker 1 (36:27):
And you do that for a job, sure, well like
high school?

Speaker 2 (36:30):
No, this is is college.

Speaker 1 (36:32):
What kind of dough do you make doing that?

Speaker 2 (36:34):
Jack?

Speaker 1 (36:35):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (36:35):
But it's fun. It's cool work, you know, you just
listening to be in a few bucks pretty much hang
out with some cool dudes, and you know's.

Speaker 1 (36:43):
Yeah, yeah, I gotcha.

Speaker 2 (36:44):
It's a good, good early college job, you know what
I mean.

Speaker 1 (36:47):
I think it'd be cool. And I mean there's a
very cool T shirt local T shirt shop here that
every time I go over there because that's where our friend, uh,
the patchmaker, Katie Culp works, or at least she used
to think she's got her own space now, but she
shared a space with T shirt dudes. And anytime I'm
in there, it's just a good vibe, you know what
I mean, It really is there a lot worse places

(37:09):
to spend your time than a T shirt shop? So oh,
another thing we should point out is that he did
do color occasionally, but color was a hole different. You
had to do a separate stone for each color. So
that's why a lot of his stuff ended up in
black and white, aside from the fact that he liked
it as well.

Speaker 2 (37:26):
Yeah, he seemed to be very pleased with black and
white in general.

Speaker 1 (37:29):
Yeah, I'm not saying he was lazy.

Speaker 3 (37:31):
No, but let's take a step back here for a
second and examine the idea that you thought mc yesher
was a pretty amazing artist when you just imagined that
he was sitting in his studio drawing all of this
stuff with a pencil. Now, really let it sink in
that he carved these things in reverse out of wood
or limestone or limestone and then use these crazy techniques

(37:54):
to make these extraordinarily detailed, incredibly precise and technical works
of art.

Speaker 1 (38:02):
It's amazing. It really is amazing, truly astounding. And like
you said, there are a few of those stones and
woodblocks that are owned by the mc escher Foundation.

Speaker 2 (38:11):
Snago puts on every single one of them.

Speaker 1 (38:13):
And apparently they will display them occasionally along with his works.

Speaker 3 (38:17):
Right, which I imagine seeing that and then looking at the
work of art, and then going back and looking at
that limestone and then looking at the work of art.
It really kind of sinks in, like, oh my.

Speaker 1 (38:28):
Yeah, I'd love to see an exhibition of his stuff.

Speaker 2 (38:30):
Me too. They've picked up in recent years, have they.

Speaker 1 (38:34):
Yeah, it seems like he's being more appreciated as a
truly great artist and less college dorm wall material.

Speaker 2 (38:41):
Yeap.

Speaker 3 (38:42):
In twenty eleven, the record for highest overall attendance in
the world out of all the museums in the world
that year was at the Centro Cultural Banco to Brazil,
which held their Magical World of Escher exhibit. Oh wow,
five hundred and seventy thousand visitors about ten thousand a day.

Speaker 1 (39:01):
Holy cow.

Speaker 2 (39:02):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (39:02):
So if you think lithography and woodcutting sounds difficult, we'll
talk a minute about mesotint. That is sort of like woodcutting,
except you're using a sheet of copper that starts out
as a rough surface and then use these little tools
to smooth out things that are going to be the image,

(39:23):
applying that ink and then wiping it off.

Speaker 3 (39:25):
Right, So the places you smooth out are don't have ink.
The ones that are going to be white on the
paper are blank on the paper. Right, it's the rough
edges that hold the ink. So you cover the whole
thing with ink, wipe it down. The smooth start parts
come clean. The rough stuff has the ink, and you

(39:46):
can use this like this is this isn't like, oh
look I'm made an X, right, this is like incredibly
fine stippling is possible with these copper plates and all
this mezotint And that I that you were talking about
with the skull. If you go back and look at that,
that was a mezzo tint.

Speaker 1 (40:05):
Yes, it was de drop, very detailed cupped leaf showing
a single drop of dew inside it, with all kinds
of cool reflections. But Escher called this the black art.
He only made eight of these because it is a
real undertaking, and I think he's just he did a
handful of him and then moved on to the far

(40:26):
easier wood cutting.

Speaker 2 (40:27):
Right right, He's like, oh, I came back, baby.

Speaker 1 (40:32):
All right, We'll take a break and then we'll come
back and pick up with his life story again, which
is I believeably left off in what end of world
War two sounds right, all right, Okay, world War Two

(41:06):
is over. Mc esher was, like a lot of people,
very rattled by that experience in Europe. And at this
point he's still is not a super famous artist making
tons of money.

Speaker 3 (41:20):
No, but he's more famous than this makes him out
to be. Like, yeah, he's got some renown in the Netherlands,
there's certain circles of bits. Yeah, but he's not anywhere
anywhere even approaching how he is today or how he
has been the last few decades, since about like the
late sixties.

Speaker 1 (41:37):
Yeah, college dorms have not yet started putting his stuff everywhere.

Speaker 3 (41:40):
No, but the people who who most appreciate what he's
doing are scientists and mathematicians who are like, this is astounding.
This guy is taking what we write out as formulas
and turning them into art and making them precise. Yeah,
like you could describe this work of art as a formula.
That is what mc esher was able to do. He

(42:02):
was able to take math and translate it into a
visual art.

Speaker 1 (42:05):
Yeah. And you know, remember what you said earlier, This
is where we are in his life. Where he is
he is not in the Italian countryside.

Speaker 2 (42:13):
He's been ripped from its bodice, So.

Speaker 1 (42:15):
His muse is gone and he is now looking inward
for his inspiration in his own unique brain.

Speaker 2 (42:21):
He's being forced into his own bodice. Face first.

Speaker 1 (42:25):
This is where he starts with these tessellations, more elaborate
geometric shapes. He's doing the lizards and the birds and
the insects. His tessellations, really really cool stuff. His brother said, hey, dude,
you know what you should do is go talk to
a crystallographer. He's like, if you want to talk detailed
shapes in maths, And he does so, and that taught

(42:46):
him a lot. And then he learned about the seventeen
wallpaper groups, which is so dense that I, you know,
how much do we even want to talk about it?

Speaker 2 (42:56):
Well, we'll just sum it up.

Speaker 3 (42:58):
The seventeen wallpaper groups basically is a mathematical concept that
says every geometric pattern two dimensional geometric pattern falls into
one of seventeen categories. There's only seventeen, and they're called,
kind of half jokingly, the wallpaper groups because wallpaper has
geometric patterns. I usually right, Escher couldn't understand it mathematically.

Speaker 1 (43:20):
Yeah, it was proved out twice independently that there are
seventeen wallpapers the mathematical proof.

Speaker 3 (43:26):
One of the things that's interesting, Chuck, is the Alhambra
apparently is the only place in the world that contains
all seventeen geometric wallpaper.

Speaker 1 (43:36):
Patterns within its walls. That's pretty cool.

Speaker 3 (43:38):
Yeah, so of course this would appeal to Esher, But
he didn't understand. He couldn't sit down and explain, like,
we can't what the seventeen wallpaper groups are or what
they mean mathematically, but he understood them intuitively, and as
he became friends with mathematicians know about mid career, he

(43:59):
was apparently kind of amused to find like, you know,
these guys spend all this time writing this stuff out
in these formulas, and I just know it. It was
almost like I was born knowing it. Yeah, you know,
I mean, I guess he was real cocky. Yeah, he
wasn't really just kidding.

Speaker 1 (44:13):
And I didn't get the idea either that he was
like take your math and shove it. He was just
a little more amused that, like, you've got these mathematical
proofs that like, I'm drawing this stuff from my creative
brain on limestone on limestone, cutting it out of wood.
So I think he appreciated the way they coalesced. But

(44:35):
and he was very like you said, most of his
friends were mathematicians I think later in life. Who did
he have Penroses? Yeah, Roger and Lionel Pinrose, which I
love how it's described here, father and son mathematician team. Yeah, yeah,
you know those.

Speaker 3 (44:51):
They were matching dolphin shorts, oh man, part of their uniform.

Speaker 1 (44:56):
I wish people still wore those. Yeah, did you ever
wear those?

Speaker 2 (44:59):
No, we were a little before my time.

Speaker 1 (45:01):
Well, they were for joggers and runners.

Speaker 3 (45:04):
Yeah, and it twenty eleven and who do I forgot
about that?

Speaker 2 (45:10):
Yeah? That is what Hooters waitresses.

Speaker 1 (45:11):
Orange shorts with remember bronze panny house.

Speaker 2 (45:15):
There Yeah, and then chunky white socks.

Speaker 1 (45:17):
Yeah, and it was a very back high tops.

Speaker 2 (45:18):
It was bizarre.

Speaker 1 (45:19):
Interesting.

Speaker 3 (45:20):
Look somebody put that together and not a woman. Do
you remember there was a there was a Hooters airline
what yeah, wow.

Speaker 1 (45:29):
That kind of rings a bell. Yeah. That was very
short lived, I imagine.

Speaker 2 (45:32):
I believe, so it was pretty short lived.

Speaker 1 (45:35):
Interesting, I guess. Yeah, so you would get asked like
what kind of drink and what style of chicken wing
do you want to get?

Speaker 3 (45:42):
They did serve chicken wings on those of course, but
can you imagine being on an airplane being forced to
smell chicken wings the whole time if you didn't like it.

Speaker 1 (45:49):
Uh, that's like every flight I ever take. It's true,
there's somebody with some stinky food.

Speaker 3 (45:54):
You know. If I sit next to somebody on the
plane and I'm going to eat, I ask them if
it's okay if I eat.

Speaker 1 (46:00):
Like if you bring food on yep. I don't bring
food onto.

Speaker 2 (46:03):
A flight sometimes, dude, you just have to. Yeah, it's
a long flight.

Speaker 3 (46:07):
And sure, I'm not going to run out of turkey
wraps like in the first half a second.

Speaker 1 (46:11):
So you just pull out your what my kung pow
out of your pocket you had just in case they're
out of turkey wraps?

Speaker 2 (46:17):
Yea, not even in the containers, just in my pocket.

Speaker 1 (46:20):
Oh goodness. So I thought this part was sort of
amusing how orderly he always was with his art, and
he tried to get into chaos a bit in this
one work contrast parentheses Order and chaos parentheses, wherein he
went and dug up a bunch of trash and said

(46:42):
I will draw chaos, and it ended up being if
you go and look at it. There's like a broken bottle,
broken eggshell, an open sardine tin and broken clay pipe
and some other refuse drawn to like perfect or I
guess woodcutter lithographed with perfect, beautiful precision.

Speaker 2 (46:59):
Right was chaos his interpretation of it.

Speaker 1 (47:02):
He just couldn't do it.

Speaker 3 (47:02):
He was very much preoccupied with Kassi. He has a
very famous quote, probably his most famous quat quote, we
adore chaos because we'd love to produce order. And he's like,
by we, I mean me, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (47:14):
Sure, sounded very much like an eye statement.

Speaker 3 (47:17):
But he was very much into geometry and precision and
clean lines and all that.

Speaker 1 (47:22):
Yeah. And also as his career would progress, this this
these repeating patterns on a finite space. If you've seen
his circle limit series, that's where you'll find the fish
or these demons. And they start out with like one
in the center, and then there's a pattern all around,
and as it gets closer and close to the edge,
they get smaller and smaller and smaller, and you can

(47:45):
just sort of imagine that there is no end to
these shapes.

Speaker 3 (47:49):
That they're just going infinitely around the sphere. Yeah, perfectly,
but again you have to stop and remind yourself this
is a two dimensional image I'm looking at right, and
then secondly.

Speaker 2 (47:57):
This is cut out of wood.

Speaker 3 (48:00):
But yeah, he apparently made a three dimensional wood carving
of his circle limits series later on in life. And
I'll bet that's spectacular to see too. He made it,
what a three dimensional wood carving of it, basically proving
that his two dimensional drawing was accurate. Yeah, because he
made it in the three dimensions, that's awesome.

Speaker 2 (48:19):
Yeah, he was just showing off towards the end there.

Speaker 1 (48:23):
I like reptiles that's going aside from his early countryside
work that is far superior. The tessellation of the lizards
and reptiles is really neat. That's the one that has
the lizards being like crawling off of the page as
a drawn image, circling around, walking over some books, and
then crawling back over onto the page as a drawn image. Yeah,

(48:46):
very neat.

Speaker 3 (48:46):
It's a lot like the hands drawing or drawing hands
one kind of where the hands are drawing themselves or
one another, but they're also three dimensional two and that
actually kind of jobs with another quote he had then,
I think really sums that style of art up. He said,
the flat shape irritates me. I feel as if I

(49:07):
were shouting to my figures, you are too fictitious for me.
You just lie there, static and frozen together. Do something.
Come out of there and show me what you are
capable of. And he would shout it just like that.

Speaker 1 (49:20):
And then Jetta would back out of the room slowly. Okay, dear,
here's your t Yeah. And that sort of brings us too.
With the reptiles. We need to talk a little bit
about illusion because it started sort of early on. He
was preoccupied with illusion, whether it was like these lizards
coming off the page or still Life in Street, which

(49:42):
is a tabletop that blends into a street scene.

Speaker 2 (49:45):
That's a neat one.

Speaker 1 (49:45):
Yeah, it's really cool. I like that one too, or relativity,
which I don't know. I mean, is there a most
famous maybe hands?

Speaker 3 (49:53):
It's between hands self portrait with sphere and relativity.

Speaker 1 (49:57):
Yeah. Relativity is the one with the staircases.

Speaker 3 (49:59):
Yeah, people going up and downstairs that don't go anywhere,
but they go everywhere and they circle back on each
other and it's just an impossible staircase actually called Penrose Stairs.

Speaker 1 (50:09):
Oh really.

Speaker 2 (50:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (50:10):
After the famous father and son mathemagician.

Speaker 2 (50:13):
Team and speaking of the Penrose as they did.

Speaker 1 (50:16):
I'd just say, mathemagician, I just invented something I.

Speaker 3 (50:19):
Did that's amazing, completely by accident the Penroses. That would
be great, mathemagician.

Speaker 1 (50:25):
Yeah, I bet that's something four right.

Speaker 3 (50:31):
But the Penroses apparently wrote they saw some of Esher's work,
wrote a paper explaining his work about impossible things like
impossible stairs, which came to be called Penrose stairs. And
Esher was either mailed a copy of this or somebody
pointed out to him. So he created something called house
of stairs or upstairs downstairs, one of the two, and

(50:54):
sent one of the original prints to the Penroses. So,
in a way, their correspondence and inspiration for one another
was like a set of impossible stairs in real life.

Speaker 2 (51:04):
That interesting.

Speaker 1 (51:05):
Yeah, And this is you know, we were talking earlier
about how his works somehow felt unsettling, and you know
the subject matter as well. When you think about these
the subjects walking in relativity, clearly never getting anywhere, walking
downstairs sideways, all of a sudden, I'm walking back into

(51:25):
the same staircase I was just on. Like you imagine,
if these things were to come alive, they would be frustrated,
angry people.

Speaker 2 (51:33):
Right.

Speaker 3 (51:33):
And as a matter of fact, one of the one
that you're just talking about upstairs downstairs, they that was
supposedly based on some a staircase in his school. Oh really,
which suddenly says quite a bit about his psychology, don't
you think?

Speaker 1 (51:51):
Well? How so?

Speaker 2 (51:52):
Well?

Speaker 3 (51:53):
I mean, like, these students aren't going anywhere, they're not
even human. There's centipedes with human faces, gotcha, gotcha.

Speaker 2 (51:59):
And they're kind of trapped in this well.

Speaker 3 (52:01):
You could definitely call like a a purposeless existence in
this building. It's kind of a dark building.

Speaker 1 (52:11):
Interesting. So he does finally achieve really great fame later
in his life. Like you said, he was holding exhibitions
in the Netherlands and a little bit in Europe, but
he did one in Belgium in nineteen fifty. That led
to an article in The Studio, which was an art magazine,

(52:31):
and that captured the attention of a journalist who wrote
about him in Time and Life magazines, which definitely propped
him up a little bit.

Speaker 2 (52:38):
Yo.

Speaker 1 (52:39):
Yeah. Then that led to a larger exhibition at the
International Mathematical Congress in fifty four. Flash forward to sixty six,
he was featured in Mathematical Games Column and Scientific American
by Martin Gardner mathemagician, I guarantee you that's a thing.

(53:00):
And that increased his And this was sixty six, so
it was kind of perfect timing with the hippies and
the drugs and the counterculture. And I guess who was
at Graham.

Speaker 3 (53:09):
Nash Graham Nash Mick Jagger sent him a fan ladder
and made the mistake of calling him by his first name.
Oh really, Jessher did not appreciate Stanley Kubrick tried to
recruit him to make two thousand and one in Space Odyssey,
a fourth dimensional film.

Speaker 1 (53:25):
Huh.

Speaker 2 (53:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (53:25):
There's this interesting article called the Impossible World of mc
Escher that Stephen Poole wrote in The Guardian that has
a lot of that stuff in it. But he was
kind of like, no, I'm good over here with my
mathematician friends.

Speaker 1 (53:37):
Well, once he was featured in Scientific American, that led
to the big daddy of them all. He got featured
in Rolling Stone, and then after that it was all over.

Speaker 2 (53:47):
He was huge, Yeah, dorm room huge.

Speaker 1 (53:50):
Four hundred and forty eight works. Then this doesn't count
all the sketches and drafts. These are like the actual
final works, right, And like we said earlier, he dies
nineteen seventy two of cancer the age of seventy three.
And I tried to find more about his family, but
there's not a lot out there, like his sons and
whether or not his I mean, I guess his grandkids

(54:10):
would be contemporaries of ours.

Speaker 3 (54:14):
Yep, I don't know, Like he was born in eighteen
ninety nine, Well, great grandkids maybe.

Speaker 1 (54:20):
Yeah, Okay, I guess if his kids were born in
the nineteen twenties, Yeah, contemporaries of our parents maybe.

Speaker 2 (54:27):
Sure. The old stirs Yeah boomers.

Speaker 1 (54:30):
Hey, boomer, Boomer. Okay, boom hey boomer. So get that right.

Speaker 3 (54:35):
In that Journey to Infinity movie, apparently all three of
his children appear in it.

Speaker 2 (54:40):
Oh really, if you want to know more about them,
go watch that.

Speaker 1 (54:43):
I saw one picture of him where he looked a
lot like our old colleague John Fuller when John had
a beard.

Speaker 3 (54:49):
Oh yeah he did, didn't It looked a little bit
like him. Yeah, it's not expecting that, nop. So there's
mc es sure, that's right. Speaking of not expecting that,
Babe on Corvette Sure and Hooters air Line made appearances
in the mcs. You're I just want to point out
if you want to know more about any of those things,

(55:11):
go on to the internet and start searching. And since
I said that, it's time for listener mail.

Speaker 1 (55:19):
Hey guys, I've been listening to your show since twenty eleven.
I even seeing you. I've even seen you on your
first amazing show in Chicago and had to wait a
whole year to hear that on the podcast. Oh yeah,
that's how it works.

Speaker 3 (55:32):
Sure, Sorry, it's not even guaranteed that it's going to
be the show you saw.

Speaker 2 (55:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (55:37):
A lot of podcasts put out just tons and tons
of live shows. We don't do that. No, Yeah, and
I honestly think the live shows are a little better
in person. I don't think they make as a fan
of other podcasts, I don't think they make for the
best just regular content.

Speaker 2 (55:53):
I think most people think.

Speaker 1 (55:54):
That, but we just so. That's why we only put
out the one, right, So back to the letter, This
show is so great I would even save high interest
episodes for my son to listen to over the years. Nice,
you were one of the few people that can keep
his attention. I never thought I would write, but as
a science teacher, you said something recently that's so true.
Some of the best science websites are children's science websites.

(56:16):
Or if a definition is too difficult, I always tell
people to look up a child's definition for that word.
Really good tip, guys. Thanks for sharing that. Thanks for
all your work, and now I will have to figure
out what to do now that I am finally caught up.
Keep up the great work. And that is from Jenny
with an Eye.

Speaker 2 (56:33):
Thanks Jenny with an Eye.

Speaker 3 (56:35):
Hopefully you dot the I with the heart, maybe with
a little reflection on the side of the heart. You
remember that one two curve lines top with topped and
I guess bottomed with.

Speaker 2 (56:45):
A straight line.

Speaker 1 (56:46):
I think I know what you're talking about, Caro.

Speaker 2 (56:47):
I'll show you.

Speaker 1 (56:50):
Oh boy, since we just dis oh oh sure that yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (56:56):
It almost looks like a bent Roman numeral to inside
the heart. That's the reflection of light. That's where the
light's coming from.

Speaker 1 (57:05):
It's beautiful.

Speaker 2 (57:05):
Thanks to Escher reference.

Speaker 1 (57:07):
I'll treasure that.

Speaker 2 (57:08):
You're welcome check. I wasn't going to give it to you,
but now.

Speaker 1 (57:11):
I have to just sign it first.

Speaker 3 (57:12):
If you want to get in touch with us, you
can go on to stuff you should know dot com
and look for our social links there. And you can
also send us an email like Jenny with and I did.
You can send it to.

Speaker 2 (57:24):
Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.

Speaker 1 (57:29):
You Know Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.