Stuff You Should Know - MC Escher and His Trippy Art

Episode Date: December 17, 2019

We love us some MC Escher. Turns out his story is pretty fascinating too. Tune in today.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart radios, How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there,

and this is Stuff You Should Know, the arts C edition. This is Jerry Broomtown Rowan. Yeah, I think that's make-believe stuff. ROOMTOWN? Yeah, she might as well be like, let me capture a few fairies in this mason jar first. I think it's the same thing. We may need those in the final edit.

Fairies. I don't know what it is about to explain to everyone. ROOMTOWN 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? Sure, you layer it in, in case you need it or something. Did you hear that, everyone?

She said she cleans up the background. To everybody listening, it sounded like, want, want, want, want, want. There's something about it, though, it's like being in church and getting the giggles. It's really hard, especially on a film set when there's like 50 people standing around being completely silent and farting.

I suspect it's strictly a power trip. You think so? By the person calling for ROOMTOWN. That's what I think. I'm gonna start doing that in my house when things get out of hand. ROOMTOWN! Let me see if that works.

Don't make me bust out the ROOMTOWN on you. Well, since we're talking about, no, I was gonna say since we're talking about ROOMTOWN, obviously the topic today is MC Escher, who was well known for going berserk anytime someone asked him to be quiet for ROOMTOWN. You would trash chairs, grab reptiles straight out of the two dimensions and throw them into the third dimension,

just do all sorts of weird stuff. That's funny. Did you think so? That was a joke just for you. Yeah, so he, everyone knows MC Escher if you've ever been to college or taken drugs. Or sold drugs to somebody in college? Then you've probably seen hands, drawing hands,

or I mean, that's not what the name of that one was, but. It's called drawing hands. Oh, is it? Or some of his more famous ones are these impossible rooms, like stairs that lead to sideways stairs, but you gotta wrap your head around it in a certain way to even make sense of it all. Right, or stairs that lead into other stairs

that lead back into the other stairs, which is constant. Or I'm a big fan of that one self-portrait he did in the. With the sphere? Yeah. The mirror sphere. Mirror sphere, it's cool. It is very cool. 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, it's very pretty. 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.

And there's a great factoid that I hope will hold till the end, or not the end, but kind of where it falls in our non-outline. What does factoid mean again? Does that mean you've killed 10% of all the facts? That's right. And this is just one of the 10% remaining? That's right.

Okay, gotcha. So, one of the things to talk about, MC Escher, that I found was that if you are impressed by his work, prepare to get exponentially more impressed as we talk about how he made those works, too. Well, that's the fact of the show to him, for me. Oh, okay, that's the factoid you were talking about?

Yeah, we gotta hold on to that. Oh, sure, sure, sure, sure. I was just teasing it a little bit. I didn't know that's what you were talking about, although I should have guessed. So, this is us 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 Cornelius. I wanna say Cornelius, but there's no you in there. I think Cornelius. Sure, Escher. I nailed the last name. That's right. But I misspoke on name.

Oh, you didn't say name? I said Nerm. I said I nailed the last Nerm. This is the point where the people say get to the point already. Well, we are at that point, that's MC, and then Escher, born June 17th, 1898, not 1989, as the Grabster put it.

I was like, man. He's like, here's some numbers. He was born in Leeuwarden, Netherlands, grew up in Arnhem, which is about 60 miles southeast of Amsterdam. Is that right? Yeah, I mapped all this stuff out. Nice.

It's all in kind of that general area. You went on a little Google tour? Sure, and he signed, even from early on, as MCE, he signed his paintings, although people called him Mock, M-A-U-K, friends and family. Right, which doesn't mean anything Ed points out, but it's just like, you know,

an affectionate term for Moritz. Yeah. Is it Moritz? Probably Moritz. Moritz, Cornelius, Escher. But it could also go the way of Morris. So is it Moritz? Or Moritz?

I don't know. I wish I knew. Well, what we do know is that, and 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. He was a rich kid, for sure.

Which really helps, as we'll see, as he's traipsing around Europe on dad's dime. Slowly getting better at art, slowly. 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. 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 his finals, all of them except for math. And I read that his father noted in his journal

with some affection that his son consoled himself by producing a linotype of a sunflower. That's how he made himself feel better after failing out of school. 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. Like I'm an artist, I'm not that kind of mathematician. 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, it's a full-length documentary. I believe the whole thing's on YouTube. And the trailer starts out with Graham Nash saying, hey, I called up MC Escher one day just to say, Mr. Escher, 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. That runs counter to this. Spoke to him directly, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, it's crazy, not to spoil anything, but he died in 1972 at just 73. So if he were to live to his mid-80s, which is somewhat reasonable, he would have been alive in the 80s, which just seems so weird. It does seem kind of weird. Yeah, because he seems counter-cultural for sure,

even though his personality was not very counter-cultural. And he didn't really have much love for hippies. In fact, he later said that the hippies in San Francisco are illegally making copies of my work. Right. He didn't exactly follow 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. That's right. I was trying to make a square joke, but it's not coming to me. Remember that show? Square peg, square peg, square, square, pegs. Sarah Jessica Parker.

Was she in that? She was also in Girls Just Want to Have Fun. That's right. And I'm going to see her on Broadway next spring. Really? Yeah, she and her husband are co-starring in Plaza Suite, Neil Simon's Plaza Suite. Very nice.

Very excited about that. I'm trying to align it with the Bonnie Prince Billy show, but they're like a week apart. And I'm like, I can't just stay in New York for a week. That's a lot of time to kill, especially when there's hourly flights between Atlanta and New York. 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, not Harlem, New York.

Well, I think that's what the Harlem, New York is named after, right? Yeah. Bonnie Prince Billy's playing. He went to Amsterdam. He's at Town Hall, actually. Oh, is that right? Yeah, we played there.

That's right. We got our stank on that joint. So his dad said, you know, because his dad had a lot of money and made money, and even though you want to support your kids, you want to try and edge them into something, 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 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 Jusseran de Mesquita. Mm-hmm, 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 Escher'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. All of his work is very graphic in nature.

And designing. Yeah, it really, really is. But I'm sure his dad in the early 1920s was probably like, is that even a thing? Right, that sounds made up. But 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. 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. And he probably thought graphic design just meant like, you're gonna make signs. Right, or post his stamps or Christmas paper, which he did later on.

That's right, so he made a little bit of dough. So in the early 1920s, he started on his sort of rich kid journey, traveling around Europe, on his dad's dime. On a gap year that was really, really long. 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. One in Spain at the Alhambra,

and then just traveling through Southern Italy, through the countryside. Yeah, he just fell in love with Italy. Yeah, but in Spain, this is one that didn't bear fruit right away, but he was really fascinated by these mosaics and tessellations, which are described as. 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. Yeah, like if you've ever seen the Escher fish, sort of tessellation. The white fish and the black fish

kind of working in one another. 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 tessellations. 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. Loved it, I mean, he went to Italy, and he was like, this is my home. And he was quoted at one point in time as saying,

he never wanted to become an Italian among Italians. He liked being a stranger, but he loved Italy. Yeah, which is an interesting thing to say, I'm not exactly sure what it means. I think what he was saying was 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?

Sure. Whereas if you can be like that guy over there who will accept him, we're not gonna throw rocks at him every time we see him or anything like that, and we'll take his money and maybe even say hi to him or whatever, but we'll leave him alone. 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. Well, that kind of came through in his work too, because if you'll notice, even in these, before he started doing the trippy three-dimensional hands-drawing 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 lifes 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. Yeah, like very clearly, a lot of them. I love them too, they're cool. Yeah, they're beautiful. They're black and white, and then shades of gray, which is all just shading, right? Yeah.

But they are beautiful in their way, lovely even. I like this stuff more than the trippy stuff. Oh yeah? Yeah, I mean, this is something I would put on my wall. You're an art snob, you're like, oh, I only like Escher's early Italian landscapes. Oh man. Take that, say the trippy stuff for Graham Nash.

I'm so ashamed. No, I think it's great, Chuck. You have cultivated yourself. But they are gorgeous. And then in 1923, he met his wife, his name was Jetta. Jetta Umiker. That's right, very nice.

Thank you. She was Swiss. I learned from the best. 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 M.C. Escher movie would be pretty cool. Somebody wrote a script, or they wrote a dissertation

about the process of writing a script about M.C. Escher. It's from the University of Texas. I wrote it in 2017, I can't remember the name of it, but just look up, oh, just some random stuff comes up if you look up Mosquita Boot Print, which will come up later. Oh, right. But if you search that on Google, it brings up,

have you ever done that? Have you ever been like, I'm bored. I wanna 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 wanna give you just randomness. So you have to trick it.

So maybe you'll type in a weird word, or the first three letters of a word or something like that, and weird stuff will start to come. Well, if you type in Mosquita Boot Print, probably only like the first three of them pertain to M.C. Escher, and the rest are just a random assortment of links. 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. And I don't know if you remember them doing that,

but I just thought it was a colossal waste of time. But I remember that some guy did like a TED talk about that. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, well, maybe I'm the dummy. No, no, no, it was, man. I mean, look at me, I do like M.C. Escher's early work. I think that's awesome.

I mean, what taste, you know? So he meets and gets married, she returns to Italy, they married in 1924. Do you mean Jedda Umaker? That's right, she would become Jedda Escher. Jedda Umaker Escher. And they had a son named Giorgio, later had sons Arthur and Jan.

And they were still just sort of traveling and his dad was, even though he was married, his dad was still foot in the bill. Escher's dad, M.C. Escher's father. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which I was thinking about it. I was like, gosh, you know.

He had a benefactor. Wake up every day and look at yourself in the mirror. But if you're- Look at the mirror sphere. Right, and then how do you draw it? So amazingly. The father, Escher's father, though, they're 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. And that's like- If that's how it went down, that's awesome. That's the pinnacle of what a parent can do for their child in a lot of ways.

No, totally, I agree. You know, 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 Ibiza. True. I want to know more. I'm not, I hope I'm not coming across as cynical,

but I wonder if some of this was like, he'll come around if I, you know, to architecture or whatever. 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 just 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. It was. It all seems above board.

Yeah. So World War II has a profound effect on Escher and his work in 1935. He learned that they were making his nine-year-old son, Giorgio, marching fascist youth parades. And he said, pack your bags. We're going to Switzerland. That is the appropriate response to that news.

Yeah. We're getting out of here marching for Mussolini. Have you seen Jojo Rabbit yet? No. Is it good? Is it as good as it looks? It's great. It's great, everything about it is great.

Do I need to see it in theater? It doesn't seem like one I have to see in theater. 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, so. Don't tell me that. I didn't know that. I know I had no idea. Hitler's on the poster.

I know, but I didn't know he was an imaginary friend. Oh, get out of my brain. Sorry, that really doesn't spoil anything. Okay. Don't tell me anything else. That's not some big reveal. So they go to Switzerland, all apologies. It's all right, I'll let it slide.

It's really not a big deal. As long as it's not a big spoiler. No, no, no, no, of course not. 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. Which is just beautiful compared to Switzerland.

Belgium's nice. Sure. In May of 1940 though, the Nazis invaded Belgium and so they moved to the Netherlands in 1941. Where the Nazis already were. Yeah. I guess they were, can't occupy it again. Well, and it's home.

Right. And they've settled in Barn, which is about 23 miles southeast of Amsterdam. I don't know if that's how you're supposed to say it. B-A-A-A-A-R-N. Right. I like it. But it's probably Baron.

Oh yeah, I'll bet you just nailed it. I think so, but Dutch is very strange. It is. Language. I mean not strange, but just for my English, dumb English ears. Supposedly English is the strangest of all. Yeah, I'm sure.

It's just a hybrid, mongrel language that doesn't make any sense to anyone who's not a native speaker of it. You know what is an interesting language is Welsh. Cause 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. It's all old Celtic stuff. Yeah. It's very unusual. Gallic, Gallic.

Yeah. I think it's Gallic. It's like a language group. One of the two. Everything I know about Welsh, I learned from Super Furry Animals. Oh yeah. Cause that guy's Welsh.

Man, I saw them blow granddaddy off the stage one time. Oh, you saw him live? Oh, I think you told me that. It melted my brain. It was so good. I'll bet, I'll bet. So they're traveling around still, even though they're settled in Barron

and they go back to Alhambra in Spain, which I don't think we said what that is. No, it's a 13th century Moorish castle from when the Moors conquered Spain. It's beautiful. It is very beautiful. And they 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. But this castle was done in these tiles that are renowned for being some of the most beautiful geometric, like Islamic patterns you've ever seen in your life. And they got to Escher. 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. Started drawing them, jetted it too. It says that they worked together.

So I didn't know that she was an artist. I didn't either. But they, World War II comes back around, well, that 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.

He wasn't doing as much traveling. No, he was in the Netherlands. And he rekindled his friendship with Moschita, his old mentor who had stayed in Netherlands this whole time. And Moschita was Jewish. And he was taken away by the Nazis eventually. He was killed at Auschwitz, I believe, with his wife. Terrible.

And their son was also killed at another concentration camp by the Nazis. And this really got to Escher. Like this was one of his dear friends. And he had a work, a sketch of Moschitas. When he went to his house to visit Moschita, he found the door was open and they 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 Moschitas that had a Nazi boot print on it. And that's what you were referenced earlier with your Google search. Moschita boot print. Did you, was there a picture of it? No, 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 Moschitas that had a bore boot print. And that Escher hung onto this his entire life. It was very important to him. And he was not a very flowery, like passionate man or anything like that.

I get the impression that he, and this is Escher I'm talking about, that he internalized a lot of stuff. And I think that him holding onto that piece of art was probably more significant than even it appears on the outside. 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. 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? Well, people members of a Jewish family. But you said from, I think. Yeah, I mean, like they were from a Jewish family.

Oh, oh, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. He didn't hide them from the family. Right, right. Don't tell the Jewish family that you're hiding over here. No, that would have been weird. So maybe we should take a break now. Oh, I think it's unraveled.

Sort through who the good guys are. Yeah. All right. Then inside the Joshua, one shock. On the podcast, Hey Dude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses

and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references

to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude the 90s called

on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

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on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Okay, Chuck. So, World War II kind of comes and goes around Escher, despite his best efforts to escape it. And it definitely had a mark on him, but one of the other things that had a really big mark on him was having to move from Italy.

As 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 and visit small quaint towns and just 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, technically proficient, they're Chuck's favorite, but you would almost certainly have never seen them in your entire life. Were it not for him moving from Italy? Because in doing so, he lost his source of inspiration, and it 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. Yeah, because early in, like a lot of artists, early in their career, they kind of free-ranged through different styles,

trying to find their own personal thing. He had a very colorful clown period. It's very bizarre, doesn't fit with the rest of it. Very John Wayne Gacy. Right. But you can very clearly see, if you look at Moschita's work, the connection and the influence from him, although Moschita did a lot of sort of graphic portraits

and things like that, whereas Escher didn't really worry too much about humans and faces. Yeah, yeah. They were just kind of like almost after thoughts. But early on, he did start experimenting with stuff that would later become sort of his hallmark. When he did do like 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 trees that sort of go on into infinity, stuff like that, that would become very much his style later on. And Ed very astutely 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. It didn't look like just some beautiful, colorful Italian countryside. There was something kind of strange and unusual about it. 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, it 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. And it's not something you can easily put your finger on, but it's definitely there.

Yeah, like, did you see the mummified priests? Yeah. That was creepy. And then one of his- But isn't it more creepy to actually do that in real life? To mummified priests? Yeah, to stand them up like that and these little alcoves?

Well, yeah, absolutely. Sure. He was just, don't kill the messenger. And he would have sometimes skulls featured in some of his work and stuff like that, like the one of the eye, I believe called eye, right in the middle of the pupil is a skull staring back. Yeah.

So he had little touches like that without going full like, you know, Lovecraftian. Right, or Goya or something like that. No, I don't even know who that is. Oronymous Bosch? I don't know who that is. Sure you do. I'm just kidding.

Okay. I know those people. Okay. So 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 MCS or print and you thought, man, that guy could sure draw a print.

Imagine cutting that out of wood. Yeah. In reverse. In reverse. Because that's what he did. A lot of his stuff were woodcuts. Even harder than that, Chuck, is the lithograph. Yeah.

So a woodcut, if you've ever made a used a stamp or made a potato stamp as a kid. You're basically MCS, sure. Well, that's what it is. He's actually carving this 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. Right. So just take a step back and think about the esters 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 crosshatching, lines, stippling, 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 level of the woodcuts this guy was doing. Yeah, that's sort of like a t-shirt hippie. Exactly. Screen printing like a four color shirt. You got to put it on exactly in the spot

that it needs to go each time. Drag that ink across so it's not off by a centimeter because it would look bad. So the woodcuts, especially as earlier woodcuts, you can tell they are woodcuts. They look like woodcuts. Some of them do not. There's some of the Italian countryside that just.

My favorites. Yeah, are just astounding. And when you stop and think about the idea that it's not a drawing, that they're woodcuts, multiple blocked woodcuts is pretty astounding. But like I was saying, to me, even more difficult is making the lithograph. Yeah, I think I talked about this on some other episode.

I know I talked about partaking, but I also talked in industrial arts, we did offset lithography. In that social experiment high school you went to. 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 everything. This is with offset lithography. It was in, do you remember? It was in the Etch-a-Sketch episode. That's what Ohio Art originally did was lithography. Okay. Oh man, that's a deep cut. This is pre, like today you use 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 water and ink don't mix. It's sort of all built on that principle. So the areas where you have written in grease

do not hold that ink or is it the other way around? No, I think they don't hold the ink. Yeah, again, what you're doing is creating a negative image just like the wood cut essentially. Right. So you've got this attraction and repulsion interplay between ink, water and grease. Right.

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 Escher's more well-known works. 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 the wood block, you have to create the negative of it because you want the positive image on the paper. You have a very special brain 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 think in negatives like that. Like a mathematician, basically. Yeah. Your brain has to be set up that way. 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 this stuff out. Smart move. And he would destroy the limestone. Well, he wouldn't destroy it. He wouldn't scrape it clean so he could reuse it. Right.

So that's the reason, like, if you want to buy an original MC Escher, good luck. Well, there's no such thing. There's original prints that he made. Right. And apparently... But you're not going to get your hands one of those limestones.

No, but there are a couple of those left over, but he said that he wanted them, I think, canceled, is what they call it in his will. Right. Where they intentionally damage it so that even if you got ahold of one of these things and you were like, print me a brand new Escher,

there'd be like the negative image of snaggle puss like comes through and like the hand drawing hands picture. And he did not do many original prints from those original woodcuts and lithographs either. I think he only did 10 of Still Life with Spherical Mirror. And so anything, obviously, anything you buy in a Spencer Gifts is going to be a print anyway.

What? They told me it was an original. You mean Bikini Lady on Corvette. You could probably get the original of that at Spencers. You'd probably cut the original negative. Bikini Lady on Corvette. Oh man, remember those? Garfield with Lamborghini.

These lithographs, he would also layer those just like he did with the woodcuts, creating multiple plates to layer on top of one another for shading and toning and stuff like that. Right. It's just amazing. I mean, I did it to make a monkey's t-shirt. I forgot you used the screen print too, so did I.

Yeah. Well, actually the monkey's t-shirt was screen printing. I think Kimber Boyd, what I did for a lithograph, I think something to make a notepad that said like my name and something else. Oh, that's right. So you screen printed in industrial arts? Yes.

Okay. Were you ever employed gainfully as a screen printer? Oh no. Oh no. Did you do that? Yeah. No, I mean, I would have loved to it. I wasn't good enough.

Oh, it's not hard. Yeah, but I mean, you would draw the stuff or you would just... Oh no, no, no, no. No. I would like burn the screens and everything and drag the ink through. If you did that for a job? Sure.

Like high school? No, this is college. This is college. What kind of dough do you make doing that? Jack. Yeah. But it's fun. It's cool work, you know?

You just listen to music and... Get paid in beer and a few bucks. Pretty much. Hang out with some cool dudes and, you know, it's funny. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got you. Say no more. It's a good early college job, you know what I mean?

I think it'd be cool. 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, the patchmaker, Katie Kulp works. Or at least she used to. I think she's got her own space now. Oh, cool.

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. Yeah. There are a lot worse places to spend your time than a T-shirt shop. Yeah.

So, oh, another thing we should point out is that he did do color occasionally, but color was a whole 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. Yeah, he seemed to be very pleased with black and white in general.

Yeah. I'm not saying he was lazy. No. But let's take a step back here for a second and examine the idea that you thought MC Esher was a pretty amazing artist when you just imagined that he was sitting in his studio drawing all 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. Yeah. And then used these crazy techniques to make these extraordinarily detailed, incredibly precise and technical works of art.

It's amazing. It really is amazing. Truly astounding. And like you said, there are a few of those stones and wood blocks that are owned by the MC Esher Foundation. Snaggle puts on every single one of them. And apparently they will display them occasionally along with his works.

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. Yeah, I'd love to see an exhibition of his stuff. Me too. They've picked up in recent years.

Have they? Yeah, it seems like he's being more appreciated as a truly great artist in less college dorm wall material. Yeah, in 2011, 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 de Brazil, which held their magical world of Esher exhibit. Oh, wow.

570,000 visitors, about 10,000 a day. Holy cow. Yep. So if you think lithography and woodcutting sounds difficult, we'll talk a minute about mesotent. 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, applying that ink and then wiping it off. Right, so the places you smooth out are- Don't have ink. The ones that are gonna be white on the paper or 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 parts come clean, the rough stuff has the ink. And you can use this like, this isn't like, oh, look, I made an X. Right. This is like incredibly fine stippling is possible with these copper plates and all this mesotent.

And that eye that you were talking about, the one with the skull, if you go back and look at that, that was a mesotent. Yeah, so it was dew drop. Yeah. It was a 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 just, he did a handful of them and then moved on to the far easier wood cutting. Right, right. He's like, oh, I came back, baby. All right, well, we'll take a break

and then we'll come back and pick up with his life story again, which is, I believe, we'll be left off in what? End of World War II? Sounds right. All right. Then it's like the Joshua one shock. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called

David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it.

And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friends beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling

of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place

because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Okay, World War II is over. MC Escher was like a lot of people very rattled

by that experience in Europe. And at this point, he still is not a super famous artist making tons of money. No, but he's more famous than this makes him out to be. Like he's got some renown in the Netherlands or certain exhibits, 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 60s. Yeah, college dorms have not yet started putting his stuff everywhere. No, but the people 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.

Like you could describe this work of art as a formula. That is what MC Escher was able to do. He was able to take math and translate it into a visual art. Yeah, and remember what you said earlier, this is where we are in his life where he is not in the Italian countryside. He's been ripped from its bodice.

So his muse is gone and he is now looking inward for his inspiration in his own unique brain. He's being forced into his own bodice, face first. This is where he starts with these tessellations, more elaborate geometric shapes. He's doing the lizards and the birds and the insects as 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 and math. And he does so and that taught him a lot. And then he learned about the 17 wallpaper groups, which is so dense that, you know, how much do we even want to talk about it? Well, we'll just sum it up.

The 17 wallpaper groups basically is a mathematical concept that says every geometric pattern, two-dimensional geometric pattern, falls into one of 17 categories. There's only 17 and they're called kind of half jokingly the wallpaper groups because wallpaper has geometric patterns on it, usually, right? Escher couldn't understand it mathematically.

Yeah, it was proved out twice independently. That there are 17 wallpaper groups? Yeah, the mathematical proof. One of the things that's interesting, Chuck, is that Alhambra apparently is the only place in the world that contains all 17 geometric wallpaper patterns. Within its walls? That's pretty cool.

Yeah, so of course this would appeal to Escher, but he didn't understand, he couldn't sit down and explain like we can't what the 17 wallpaper groups are or what they mean mathematically, but he understood them intuitively. And as he became friends with mathematicians, about mid-career,

he was apparently kind of amused to find like, 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, I mean. I guess he was real cocky. He wasn't really, I'm just kidding. 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 and that like I'm drawing this stuff for my creative brain. On limestone. Yeah, on limestone, cutting it out of wood. So I think he appreciated the way they coalesced,

but and he was very, like you said, most of his friends were mathematicians, I think later in life, who did he, the Penroses? Yeah, Roger and Lionel Penrose. I love how it's described here. Father and son, mathematician team. Yeah.

You know those. They wore matching dolphin shorts. Oh man. It's a further uniform. I wish people still wore those. Yeah. Did you ever wear those? No, they were a little before my time.

Well, they were for joggers and runners. Yeah, I didn't start that until 2011. And who, I forgot about that. Yeah, that is what Hooters, Waitresses wore. Orange dolphin shorts with bronze pantyhose. Yeah, and then chunky white socks. Yeah, and Reebok high tops. It was bizarre.

It's an interesting look. Somebody put that together and not a woman. Do you remember there was a Hooters airline? What? Yeah. Wow, that kind of rings a bell. That was very short-lived, I imagine. I believe so, it was pretty short-lived.

Interesting. I guess, yeah. So you would get asked like what kind of drink and what style of chicken wing do you want on every flight? I guess, but 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? That's like every flight I ever take. It's true. There's somebody with some stinky food. You know, if I sit next to somebody on the plane and I'm gonna eat, I ask them if it's okay if I eat first. Like if you bring food on?

Yep. I don't bring food onto a flight. Sometimes, dude, you just have to. It's a long flight and they run out of turkey wraps like in the first half a second. So you just pull out your what? My Kung Pao. Out of your pocket?

You had just in case they're out of turkey wraps? Not even in a container, it's just in my pocket. 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, 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, a broken clay pipe and some other repues drawn to like perfect, or I guess woodcutter lithographed with perfect, beautiful precision.

Right, that was chaos, his interpretation of it. He just couldn't do it. He was very much preoccupied with chaos. He has a very famous quote, probably his most famous quote, we adore chaos because we love to produce order. And he's like, by we, I mean me, MC Escher. Sounded very much like an I statement.

But he was very much into geometry and precision and clean lines and all that. Yeah, and also as his career would progress 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 closer to the edge, they get smaller and smaller and smaller. And you can just sort of imagine that there is no end to these shapes. That they're just going infinitely around this sphere. Perfectly, but again, you have to stop and remind yourself this is a two-dimensional image I'm looking at. And then secondly, this is cut out of wood.

But yeah, he apparently made a three-dimensional wood carving of his Circle Limit series later on in life and I'll bet that's spectacular to see too. He made a what? A three-dimensional wood carving of it, basically proving that his two-dimensional drawing was accurate because he made it in the three dimensions. That's awesome.

Yeah, he was just showing off toward the end there. I like reptiles. Yeah, that's a good one. 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. Very neat. 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 too. And that actually kind of jibes with another quote he had

that I think really sums that style of art up. He said, the flat shape irritates me. I feel as if I 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.

And then Jetta would back out of the room slowly. Okay, dear. Here's your tea. And that sort of brings us to 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 is a tabletop that blends into a street scene. That's a neat one. 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? It's between hands, self-portrait with sphere and relativity.

Yeah, relativity is the one with the staircases. Yeah, and people going up and down stairs 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. Oh, really? Yeah.

After the famous father and son math magician team. And speaking of the Penrose is the... Did I just say math magician? I just invented something. Did, I did. That's amazing. Completely by accident. The Penrose is, that would be great, math magician.

Yeah, I bet that's something. Four. Right. But the Penrose is apparently wrote, they saw some of Escher's work, wrote a paper explaining his work about impossible things like impossible stairs, which came to be called Penrose Stairs.

And Escher 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 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.

Isn't that interesting? Yeah. And this is, you know, we were talking earlier about how his work somehow felt unsettling. And you know, the subject matter as well, when you think about the subjects walking in relativity, clearly never getting anywhere, walking downstairs, some sideways, all of a sudden,

I'm walking back into the same staircase I was just on. Right. Like you imagine if these things were to come alive, they would be frustrated, angry people. Right. And as a matter of fact, one of the, 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? Well, how so? Well, I mean, like these students aren't going anywhere. They're not even human.

There's centipedes with human faces. Gotcha, gotcha. And they're kind of trapped in this, what you could definitely call like a, a purposeless existence in this building. It's kind of a dark building. 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 1950 that led to an article in the studio, which was an art magazine. 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. Yeah, yeah. Then that led to a larger exhibition at the International Mathematical Congress in 54, flash forward to 66. He was featured in a Mathematical Games column in Scientific American by Martin Gardner. Math magician.

I guarantee you that's a thing. And that increased his, and this was 66, so it was kind of the perfect timing with the hippies and the drugs and the counterculture. And I guess, who was it, Graham Nash? Graham Nash, Mick Jagger sent him a fan letter and made the mistake of calling him by his first name. Oh, really?

I did not appreciate. Stanley Kubrick tried to recruit him to make 2001 a Space Odyssey, a fourth dimensional film. Yeah, there's this interesting article called The Impossible World of MC Escher that Steven 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. 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. He was huge. Yeah, dorm room, huge. 448 works, then this doesn't count

all the sketches and drafts. These are like the actual final works. And like we said earlier, he died in 1972 of cancer at the age of 73. And I tried to find more about his family, but there's not a lot out there. Like his sons and whether or not, I mean, I guess his grandkids would be

contemporaries of ours. Yeah, I don't know. Like he was born in 1899. Well, great-grandkids, maybe. Yeah, okay, I guess if his kids were born in the 1920s, yeah, contemporaries of our parents, maybe. Sure, the oldsters, boomers. Hey, boomer.

Okay, boomer. Hey, boomer. So in that Journey to Infinity movie, apparently all three of his children appear in it. Oh, really? So if you want to know more about them, go watch that. I saw one picture of him where he looked a lot like our old colleague, John Fuller, when John had a beard.

Oh yeah, he did, didn't he? Looked a little bit like him. Yeah, was not expecting that. Yep. So there's MC Escher. That's right. Speaking of not expecting that, Bikini Babe on Corvette. Sure.

And Hooters' airline made appearances in the MC Escher one, I just want to point out. If you want to know more about any of those things, go on to the internet and start searching. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. Hey guys, I've been listening to your show since 2011. 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. Sure. Sorry. Is that even guaranteed that it's going to be this show you saw? Yeah, 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. I think most people think 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 is so true.

Some of the best science websites are children's science websites. 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 Ginny with an I. Thanks, Ginny with an I. Hopefully you dot the I with the heart. Maybe with a little reflection on the side of the heart. You remember that one?

Two curved lines, topped and, I guess, bottomed with a straight line. I think I know what you're talking about. Here, I'll show you. Oh, boy. Since we just dis- oh. Oh, sure. That.

Yeah, yeah. It almost looks like a bent Roman numeral II. Inside the heart. That's the reflection of light. That's where the light's coming from. It's beautiful. Thank you. That's the Escher reference.

I'll treasure that. You're welcome, Chuck. I wasn't going to give it to you, but now I have to. Just sign it first. If you want to get in touch with us, you can go on to stuffyshinno.com and look for our social links there. And you can also send us an email like Jenny with an I did.

You can send it to stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lacher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude.

Bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help.

And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.