In his time, the Dutch artist Maurits Cornelis Escher seemed a cultural anomaly. He loathed modern art"I consider 60% of the artists nuts and fakes," he said of Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museumand was duly ignored by it. For most of his working life, critics dismissed him as a pedantic illustrator. Born in 1898, Escher was 52 before his tightly executed woodcuts, lithographs and engravings began to attract even a crumb of attention. A retiring, ironic man with the bony nose and goat beard of an El Greco prelate, Escher took no part in art debates,...
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