After an hour and a half of talking, Joris Escher (56) tells us that he had to overcome quite a bit of embarrassment to write a book about his grandfather’s youngest brother. “Because it is not my credit that I was born with the surname Escher,” he says. “I thought: I shouldn’t show off those feathers. I also understand very well that there is mistrust, like ‘he certainly wants to surf on the waves of the great Escher’. Although that seems to be a very Dutch idea, let’s say from the perspective of Calvinist meritocracy. Well, I had that thought too. Moreover: if the sons of Escher have not already written about their father, why should I?
Perhaps because he had found that drawing among his deceased father’s belongings: an unknown drawing, made by his great-uncle, artist MC (Mauk) Escher (1898-1972), famous for his mathematically inspired prints that have also inspired mathematicians. It was a drawing that had not been seen by anyone for ninety years.
And perhaps because Joris Escher is the one in his family, he says, “who loves art the most. Always”.
And above all: five years ago he was in the Fries Museum at the opening of an exhibition called ‘Escher on a journey’. “While Escher lived in Italy for fifteen years. He wasn’t traveling, he lived there. Anyway, then I realized: I just love his work very much. That’s strange: if you grew up with something like that, if it’s part of you like that, then you don’t understand that you just love it very much. At least not me. And that gave a much nicer and more constructive force than that annoying embarrassment that holds back creativity. So then I gave myself permission to write. I thought: he is also my great-uncle. I get to tell this story.”
And now there is the book become Escher. The story began, and also begins here at the table, with that unknown drawing. Sometime in 2015 or 2016, Joris Escher and his two sisters made another attempt to empty the self-storage in Rotterdam-Alexander with the belongings of their father, who died in 2009. “On the one hand you have to clean it up once. But on the other hand, it is also a promise, it will keep your father alive as long as you don’t.” That’s why it took so long.
One of the moving boxes said ‘lacquer boxes’. Here’s the thing: Mauk’s father, Joris’ great-grandfather, worked as a hydraulic engineer in Japan from 1873 to 1878. At the request of the Japanese emperor, he built harbors and made rivers more navigable. He had received wonderful gifts, which were called ‘the Japanalia’ in the family. Like woodblock prints, ukiyo-e: “They always hung along the stairs at our house in Laren. It featured kabuki actors, and samurai, and views of Edo from Hiroshige.” Hiroshige (1797-1858) was an important Japanese printmaker; Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) copied a few of his prints.
There were also ivory fans with peacock feathers. And lacquer boxes, eight of them, most of them inlaid with mother-of-pearl and quail eggshell. “One of those lacquer boxes was actually the simple brother,” says Escher. “A bit dusty. I had never seen it before, so I opened it.” There were several puzzles carved from ivory inside. And drawings, made in 1927 by Mauk and his father, who was then already in his eighties. Mauk’s drawing shows the six steps required to solve one of the puzzles: six ivory rods with indentations halfway can be joined together to form a three-dimensional cross. The notches then fit together exactly and, as with an ingenious wood connection, are no longer visible.
Pinocchio’s way in reverse
“To solve that cross puzzle, you have to have so much three-dimensional imagination,” says Escher. “That must have been important to him, and to his artistry. I immediately thought: I have to find this out for the family and for the Escher enthusiasts. Nothing new had been written about him for forty years. Well about his work, for example by Doris Schattschneider, a fantastic American mathematician. But it is as if he as a person has traveled the opposite way from Pinocchio, as if he has become a wooden puppet. You always only see that man with the goatee. A static image. And Escher’s work is precisely about becoming, about metamorphoses, transformations, transitions.”
A waitress comes to take our order. “Oh, we haven’t looked yet,” says Escher. “Shall we do that? Which food talks easily? I think I’ll have some soup.”
Just like his great-grandfather, Joris Escher works in the water sector, but as a management consultant. He puzzles over solutions for change, for example for the future of the IJsselmeer, with many parties at the table. It is thinking in many dimensions at once. “If you like complexity, you like water issues.” He studied law and economics, he says. “In Rotterdam. Because I wanted to leave Laren, from the Gooi, and because I didn’t know very well and wanted to keep as much freedom as possible. But I’m actually self-taught, I never used my studies. Yes, finished. Compulsive neurotically finished.”
Better with the eraser
He had also considered art school. “I like drawing very much, but I am not an easy draftsman. I am better with the eraser than with the pencils.”
After his studies he did an internship in Paris and Central America, where he continued to travel for another six months. “On the motorcycle. And if you are talking about spatiality…” Because we already talked about the spatiality in Hiroshige’s prints, and also in the beautiful early work of MC Escher, the Italian landscape prints – now on display in the Kunstmuseum in The Hague. “Those valleys in Mexico,” says Joris Escher, “seen from the motorcycle, they change all the time into new valleys… fantastic. I found it hard to come back. Mauk really fled the Netherlands because of the boring two-dimensionality, you could say. And so did I.” He came back, first started working as an organizational consultant. “Including in 1993, 1994 in Burundi and in what was then called Zaire. Very nice, I can talk about it for a long time, but that is not what it is about now.”
The food comes. “Delicious too,” he says of my shrimp croquettes. “But that is less easy to say.”
In 1995, he continues, he and a friend started a gallery and art lending company for Latin American and East Asian contemporary art. The kind of art he had seen on his travels and never saw in the Netherlands. They could live on it, but in 2005 ‘I could no longer develop myself in that’ and he went back into consultancy, but this time with more attention to images and to what he calls ‘thinking with your hands’. A passion of his, he wants to write his second book about it.
He himself also thought with his hands: he drew and made prints, “in linoleum and pear wood”. There are a few in the book, and also some from Vanessa Hudig, his girlfriend, who is an art teacher at Barlaeus Gymnasium. It contains no prints by MC Escher, but works of art and other objects that (probably) influenced the artist. Mauk’s drawing of the ivory puzzle, the common thread in the book, has been copied by Joris himself.
He found drawing and printing wonderful to do, and instructive. He calls “the worship of cognition and intelligence, in our culture, actually very restrictive. See, you can get to know reality through science, and that’s great. But you can also get to know reality, explore the unknowable, through art. And you can get to know the reality by craftcraftsmanship: with your hands.”
Family language
It helped him a lot to get into his great-uncle’s head. Because that’s what he does: become Escher is a vie romancee. “I had to find a form that did him justice,” he says. “And Escher cannot be placed.” As an artist he was not taken seriously. “What is called modern art is often intuitive, spontaneous, colourful, appeals to the unconscious… all those clichés, right? I really like modern art, but Mauk was of course the exact opposite. Not spontaneously, but rationally. Craftsmanship. So it wasn’t art, it wasn’t math… or math and art. And my book is neither fiction nor non-fiction, or both. That is actually a bit of the same distinction.”
The romanticized biography can be an irritating genre if you as a reader wonder all the time whether the main character really thought and experienced something. But become Escher reads like a compelling novel, also because the use of words feels so authentic. Joris Escher writes in an old-fashioned language that comes across as absorbed from letters and diaries. “The family language,” he confirms. “I think every family has its own language. I had 61 notebooks with life sketches of my great-grandfather, who also describes the development of his sons, and conversations with them. The Escher family loved to write. There are many letters. Those from Escher himself to his sons are also beautiful.”
become Escher also greatly arouses the wanderlust. You travel with MC Escher through Italy and Spain, you see the wide landscapes, the Moorish mosaics in the Alhambra, the Byzantine church art. A sixth-century mosaic in Ravenna with an impossible perspective, a visual joke that immediately feels Escherian and that Mauk must have seen, he has been there. You also travel with Joris Escher and his girlfriend, because in short intermezzi he describes his own experiences with making prints, searching where Mauk once sat sketching, drawing himself on location.
Those intermezzi, he says, ‘actually weave together Escher’s life metamorphosis. And I can say things without writing them down: what he meant to me, the feeling that he’s part of my life, all my life, what that means to a family. It gives a kind of resonance between the generations, which I think is also part of the story.” The construction of the book, to be clear, was itself a puzzle.
The table is cleared, but Escher keeps his hands around his bowl. Mostly he was talking. “Fortunately, this soup is also delicious cold.”