Leeuwarden-Fryslan, one of the less populated parts of the Netherlands, has been designated . It鈥檚 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鈥檚 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.
When you鈥檙e invited to write about an area you know nothing about,听a good place to start is the heritage. But even that听can鈥檛 help us here. The tiny city of Leeuwarden听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.
All听Leeuwarden鈥檚听poor publicists can do then, having brought us here, is throw everything at us and hope something sticks. And so it happens听that, somewhere between the (world-leading) and , a permanent pavilion celebrating world languages, someone somewhere makes a small logistical error and locks me inside an M C Escher exhibition.
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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.
Nor is the current exhibition, Escher鈥檚 Journey, the usual, chilly celebration of the man鈥檚 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.
Adventures in听the third dimension
Escher鈥檚 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: 鈥淚 wallow in it, but so greedily that I fear that my stomach will not be able to withstand it.鈥�
The cultural feast afforded by the city was the least of it. The Leeuwarden native was equally staggered by the surrounding hills 鈥� 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鈥檚 love of the Italian landscape consumed him and, much to his mother鈥檚 dismay, he was soon permanently settled in the country.
For visitors familiar to the point of satiety and beyond with Escher鈥檚 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.听Escher鈥檚 favored medium was the engraving. It鈥檚 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.
听
The usual charge against Escher as an artist 鈥� that he was too caught up in the toils of his own visual imagination to express much humanity 鈥� is hard to rebuff. There鈥檚 a gap here it鈥檚 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).
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. 鈥淚taly, the landscape, the people, they speak to me.鈥� he explained in 1968. 鈥淪witzerland doesn鈥檛 and Holland even less so.鈥�
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鈥檚 growing fascination with the mathematics of tessellation, would draw him away from landscapes toward an art consisting entirely of 鈥渧isualised thoughts鈥�.
Approaching zero
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听Escher had come to embrace his own, somewhat sterile reputation. 鈥淚 played a game,鈥� he recalled, 鈥渋ndulged in imaginary thoughts, with no other intention than to explore the possibilities of representation. In my work I give a report on these discoveries.鈥�
In the end Escher鈥檚 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鈥檛 until after his death that Beno卯t Mandelbrot coined the word 鈥渇ractal鈥� and popularised the concept.
Eventually, I am missed. At any rate, someone thinks to open the gallery door. I don鈥檛 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鈥檛 have been left听inside Escher鈥檚 Journey for more than a few minutes. But I exited a wreck.
The Fries听Museum has lit Escher鈥檚 works using some very subtle and precise spot projection; this and the trompe-l鈥櫯搃l monochrome paintwork on the walls of the gallery form a modestly Escherine puzzle all by themselves. Purely from the perspective of exhibition design,听this charming, illuminating, and comprehensive show听is well worth a visit.
You wouldn鈥檛 want to live there, though.
听is on show at听, Leeuwarden, Netherlands, to 28 October 2018
