Skip to main content

M.C. (Maurits Cornelius) Escher Figurative Prints

Dutch, 1898-1972

Nothing is quite what it seems in the universe of Maurits Cornelis Escher (widely known as M.C. Escher). The Dutch artist, famed for his graphic prints featuring infinite staircases, twisted perspectives and self-replicating animals, was a master of illusion in more ways than one.

Escher's pictures aren’t simply puzzles designed to play tricks on the brain; they were born of a desire to stretch our powers of perception, to encourage us to cultivate a natural curiosity and playfulness about the world around us. According to New York gallerist Skot Foreman, the artist had a rare gift. “He combined the structure and analytics of the left brain with the artistic creativity of the right brain,” Foreman explains. “Somehow, he turned images into mind-bending universes that were able to stretch the boundaries of our imagination, urging us to rethink the realms of possibility within nature’s laws of order.”

But creating illusionistic illustrations was not Escher’s only talent. He was also a passionate diarist, recording his thoughts and frustrations in written form throughout his life. He often lamented that his pictures could never fully convey his cerebral imaginings. At the same time, he expressed impatience with those who couldn’t see beyond the surface appeal of his shape-shifting patterns. Escher was an artist who sought perfection and felt misunderstood by the mainstream art world.

“The most important thing about Escher is that he was always curious, always researching and exploring. Most people lose this quality as they get older, but Escher maintained a childlike enthusiasm for the world,” says Dutch filmmaker Robin Lutz, whose thoughtful feature-length film, M.C. Escher: Journey to Infinity, marries documentary footage with animation and unfolds at an unhurried pace, allowing Escher’s witty and intelligent prose to gently guide us through his creative evolution.

Escher always carried a magnifying glass in his pocket to “enjoy the tiniest details” at his feet, be it a plant climbing a rock, a butterfly or a grasshopper. He had a real passion for travel and spent more than a decade in Rome with his wife, Jetta, and young family. It was there that he first played with multiple perspectives, sketching the city’s architecture at night to avoid the “excessive baroque frills” he deemed too distracting in the daylight. Another big development was sparked by a 1936 visit to the Alhambra palace in Granada, Spain. Inspired by the Moorish tiles of the 14th-century landmark, Escher started to experiment with repeating patterns, or tessellations, creating his first woodcuts and lithographs of metamorphosing birds, lizards and fish interlocking and filling the entire surface of the paper in jigsaw fashion.

During and directly after World War II, Escher produced many of his most famous works, emotional reactions to a world plunged into chaos. This period marked the start of his fascination with impossible staircases, never-ending waterfalls and cyclical still lifes featuring figures and creatures seemingly caught in a loop, a paradox of entrapment and renewal.

Indeed, the concept of infinity was a major inspiration for him. It informs his fish-eye studies and curvilinear perspectives, which cram in so much dizzying detail it’s impossible to know where one thing ends and another begins. It’s no wonder, then, that Escher’s probing, mind-expanding prints have such enduring appeal.

Find original M.C. Escher art on 1stDibs.

to
1
Overall Width
to
Overall Height
to
1
4
834
373
349
308
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
Artist: M.C. Escher
Up And Down - Lithograph by M.C. Escher - 1947
By M.C. Escher
Located in Roma, IT
Hand Signed. Printed in black ink, and part of a limited edition thought to be of 400 specimen. Image Dimensions : 51 x 20 cm  Reference: Bool n. 352 Locher 146.  Very good conditio...
Category

1940s Modern M.C. (Maurits Cornelius) Escher Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Related Items
Figure with Female Nude- lithograph by Pablo Picasso from Verve Series
By Pablo Picasso
Located in Hamburg, DE
"Figure with Female Nude" is a lithograph taken from Picasso's Verve 29/30 series in 1954. It is printed by Mourlot in Paris, not signed. Dated in plate. It comes beautifully framed with a high-end mat in excellent condition. Picasso made the original ink and brush drawings of bullfighting in the Château of Vauvenargues, near Aix-en-Provence, where he and his partner Jacqueline Roque...
Category

1950s Modern M.C. (Maurits Cornelius) Escher Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Jon Corbino, Montana Earthquake, 1936, lithograph
By Jon Corbino
Located in New York, NY
Works by Jon Corbino (1905-1964) feature drama. Here he's showing us the chaos produced by a major earthquake in rural Montana in 1936 -- an actual historical event. The horses (ear...
Category

1930s American Modern M.C. (Maurits Cornelius) Escher Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

William B. Sharp, The Wedding, 1946, lithograph
Located in New York, NY
William Bertrum Sharp (1924-1984) served in the Armed Forces during World War II and is considered among the first artists to attend art school under the GI Bill. He studied (proba...
Category

1940s American Modern M.C. (Maurits Cornelius) Escher Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Profil de Femme, Framed Modern Lithograph by Georges Braque
By Georges Braque
Located in Long Island City, NY
Artist: Georges Braque (after), French (1882 - 1963) Title: Profil de Femme from Souvenirs de Portraits d'Artistes. Jacques Prévert: Le Coeur à l'ouvrage (M.25) Year: 1972 Medium: Li...
Category

1970s Modern M.C. (Maurits Cornelius) Escher Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

French Modernist Mourlot Lithograph Vintage Air France Poster Roger Bezombes
By Roger Bezombes
Located in Surfside, FL
Vintage French Travel Poster, Air France Roger Bezombes (1913-1994) French Bezombes was a painter, sculptor, medalist, and designer. He studied in Paris, at the École des Beaux-Arts...
Category

1980s Modern M.C. (Maurits Cornelius) Escher Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph, Offset

Large Modernist Paris Street Scene Wine Shop Montmartre Cafe Ladies Lithograph
By Charles Levier
Located in Surfside, FL
Framed 32 x 26 image 22 x 16 Charles Levier (1920-2004) He was born in 1920 of a French father and American mother in Corsica. He held a fascination with color and form that led him...
Category

Mid-20th Century Modern M.C. (Maurits Cornelius) Escher Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Alexander Calder Circus Reproduction Lithograph After a Drawing
By (after) Alexander Calder
Located in Surfside, FL
(after) Alexander Calder "Calder's Circus" offset lithograph on wove paper after drawings by the artist Published by Art in America and Perls gallery in 1964 (from drawings done in the 1930's) these range slightly in size but they are all about 13 X 17 inches (with minor variations in size as issued.) These have never been framed. The outer folio is not included just the one lithograph. James Sweeny from the introduction “The fame of Calder’s circus spread quickly between the years 1927 and 1930. All the Paris art world came to know it. It brought him his first great personal success. But what was more important, the circus also provided the first steps in Calder’s development as an original sculptor” Clive Gray wrote ”A visit to the studio of Alexander Calder led to the chance discovery of some hundred masterful circus drawings completed over thirty years ago. We publish, for the first time, a choice of sixteen from that group.” With signed introduction by Miro. These whimsical drawings, done in the style of wire sculpture, include acrobats, clowns, jugglers, trapeeze artists, an elephant, dog and lion. they are great. Alexander Calder is widely considered to be one of the most important American sculptors of the 20th century. He is best known for his colorful, whimsical abstract public sculptures and his innovative mobiles, kinetic sculptures powered by motors or air currents, which embraced chance in their aesthetic. Born into a family of accomplished artists, Calder's work first gained attention in Paris in the 1930s and was soon championed by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, resulting in a retrospective exhibition in 1943. Major retrospectives were also held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1964) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1974). Calder’s work is in many permanent collections, most notably in the Whitney Museum of American Art, but also the Guggenheim Museum; the Museum of Modern Art; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Centre Georges Pompidou. He produced many large public works, including .125 (at JFK Airport, 1957), Pittsburgh (Carnegie International prize winner 1958, Pittsburgh International Airport) Spirale (UNESCO in Paris, 1958), Flamingo and Universe (both in Chicago, 1974), and Mountains and Clouds (Hart Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C., 1976). Although primarily known for his sculpture, Calder was a prodigious artist with a restless creative spirit, whose diverse practice included painting and printmaking, miniatures (such as his famous Cirque Calder), children’s book illustrations, theater set design, jewelry design, tapestry and rug works, and political posters. Calder was honored by the US Postal Service with a set of five 32-cent stamps in 1998, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, posthumously in 1977, after refusing to receive it from Gerald Ford one year earlier in protest of the Vietnam War. Calder moved to New York and enrolled at the Art Students League, studying briefly with Thomas Hart Benton, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and John Sloan. While a student, he worked for the National Police Gazette where, in 1925, one of his assignments was sketching the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Calder became fascinated with the action of the circus, a theme that would reappear in his later work. In 1926, Calder moved to Paris, enrolled in the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and established a studio at 22 rue Daguerre in the Montparnasse Quarter. In June 1929, while traveling by boat from Paris to New York, Calder met his future wife, Louisa James (1905-1996), grandniece of author Henry James and philosopher William James. They married in 1931. While in Paris, Calder met and became friends with a number of avant-garde artists, including Fernand Léger, Jean Arp, and Marcel Duchamp. Cirque Calder (on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art at present) became popular with the Parisian avant-garde. He also invented wire sculpture, or "drawing in space," and in 1929 he had his first solo show of these sculptures in Paris at Galerie Billiet. Hi! (Two Acrobats) in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art is an early example of the artist's wire sculpture. The painter Jules Pascin, a friend of Calder's from the cafes of Montparnasse, wrote the preface to the catalog. A visit to Piet Mondrian's studio in 1930, where he was impressed by the environment-as-installation, "shocked" him into fully embracing abstract art, toward which he had already been tending. Dating from 1931, Calder’s sculptures of discrete movable parts powered by motors were christened “mobiles” by Marcel Duchamp, a French pun meaning both "motion" and "motive." At the same time, Calder was also experimenting with self-supporting, static, abstract sculptures, dubbed "stabiles" by Jean Arp in 1932 to differentiate them from mobiles. Public commissions increasingly came his way in the 1960s. Notable examples are .125 for JFK Airport in 1957, Spirale for UNESCO in Paris 1958 and Trois disques, commissioned for Expo 67 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Calder's largest sculpture at 25.7 meters high was El Sol Rojo, constructed outside the Aztec Stadium for the 1968 Summer Olympics "Cultural Olympiad" events in Mexico City. Many of his public works were commissioned by renowned architects; I.M. Pei commissioned his La Grande Voile (1966), a 25-ton, 40-foot high stabile for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Part of Calder's repertoire includes pivotal stage sets for more than a dozen theatrical productions, including Nucléa, Horizon, and most notably, Martha Graham’s Panorama (1935), a production of the Erik Satie symphonic drama Socrate (1936), and later, Works in Progress (1968). In addition to sculptures, Calder painted throughout his career, beginning in the early 1920s. He picked up his study of printmaking in 1925, and continued to produce illustrations for books and journals.As Calder’s professional reputation expanded in the late 1940s and 1950s, so did his production of prints. Masses of lithographs based on his gouache paintings hit the market, and deluxe editions of plays, poems, and short stories illustrated with fine art prints by Calder became available for sale. One of Calder's most celebrated and unconventional undertakings was a commission from Dallas-based Braniff International Airways to paint a full-size Douglas DC-8-62 four-engined jet as a "flying canvas." Calder created over 2,000 pieces of jewelry over the course of his career, many of them as gifts for friends and relatives. For his lifelong friend Joan Miró, he set a shard of a broken porcelain vessel in a brass ring. Peggy Guggenheim received enormous silver mobile earrings and later commissioned a hammered silver headboard...
Category

1930s American Modern M.C. (Maurits Cornelius) Escher Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Mi Careme de Nantes original vintage French poster
Located in Spokane, WA
Original vintage French poster: Mi Careme de Nantes carnaval poster. Printer: Jagueneau - Nantes, France. Over 50 years old, Linen ...
Category

1960s Modern M.C. (Maurits Cornelius) Escher Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Les Revolutions Sceniques du XXe Siecle - II, Lithograph by Joan Miro
By Joan Miró
Located in Long Island City, NY
Les Revolutions Sceniques du XXe Siecle - II (Cramer 207) Joan Miro, Spanish (1893–1983) Date: 1975 Lithograph Image Size: 12 x 9.5 inches Size: 14.5 in. x 10 in. (36.83 cm x 25.4 cm...
Category

1970s Modern M.C. (Maurits Cornelius) Escher Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Alexander Calder Circus Reproduction Lithograph of a Drawing
By (after) Alexander Calder
Located in Surfside, FL
(after) Alexander Calder "Calder's Circus" offset lithograph on wove paper a reproduction lithograph after the drawings by the artist Published by Art in America and Perls gallery in 1964 (from drawings done in the 1930's) these range slightly in size but they are all about 13 X 17 inches (with minor variations in size as issued.) These have never been framed. The outer folio is not included just the one lithograph. James Sweeny from the introduction “The fame of Calder’s circus spread quickly between the years 1927 and 1930. All the Paris art world came to know it. It brought him his first great personal success. But what was more important, the circus also provided the first steps in Calder’s development as an original sculptor” Clive Gray wrote ”A visit to the studio of Alexander Calder led to the chance discovery of some hundred masterful circus drawings completed over thirty years ago. We publish, for the first time, a choice of sixteen from that group.” With signed introduction by Miro. These whimsical drawings, done in the style of wire sculpture, include acrobats, clowns, jugglers, trapeeze artists, an elephant, dog and lion. they are great. Alexander Calder is widely considered to be one of the most important American sculptors of the 20th century. He is best known for his colorful, whimsical abstract public sculptures and his innovative mobiles, kinetic sculptures powered by motors or air currents, which embraced chance in their aesthetic. Born into a family of accomplished artists, Calder's work first gained attention in Paris in the 1930s and was soon championed by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, resulting in a retrospective exhibition in 1943. Major retrospectives were also held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1964) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1974). Calder’s work is in many permanent collections, most notably in the Whitney Museum of American Art, but also the Guggenheim Museum; the Museum of Modern Art; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Centre Georges Pompidou. He produced many large public works, including .125 (at JFK Airport, 1957), Pittsburgh (Carnegie International prize winner 1958, Pittsburgh International Airport) Spirale (UNESCO in Paris, 1958), Flamingo and Universe (both in Chicago, 1974), and Mountains and Clouds (Hart Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C., 1976). Although primarily known for his sculpture, Calder was a prodigious artist with a restless creative spirit, whose diverse practice included painting and printmaking, miniatures (such as his famous Cirque Calder), children’s book illustrations, theater set design, jewelry design, tapestry and rug works, and political posters. Calder was honored by the US Postal Service with a set of five 32-cent stamps in 1998, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, posthumously in 1977, after refusing to receive it from Gerald Ford one year earlier in protest of the Vietnam War. Calder moved to New York and enrolled at the Art Students League, studying briefly with Thomas Hart Benton, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and John Sloan. While a student, he worked for the National Police Gazette where, in 1925, one of his assignments was sketching the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Calder became fascinated with the action of the circus, a theme that would reappear in his later work. In 1926, Calder moved to Paris, enrolled in the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and established a studio at 22 rue Daguerre in the Montparnasse Quarter. In June 1929, while traveling by boat from Paris to New York, Calder met his future wife, Louisa James (1905-1996), grandniece of author Henry James and philosopher William James. They married in 1931. While in Paris, Calder met and became friends with a number of avant-garde artists, including Fernand Léger, Jean Arp, and Marcel Duchamp. Cirque Calder (on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art at present) became popular with the Parisian avant-garde. He also invented wire sculpture, or "drawing in space," and in 1929 he had his first solo show of these sculptures in Paris at Galerie Billiet. Hi! (Two Acrobats) in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art is an early example of the artist's wire sculpture. The painter Jules Pascin, a friend of Calder's from the cafes of Montparnasse, wrote the preface to the catalog. A visit to Piet Mondrian's studio in 1930, where he was impressed by the environment-as-installation, "shocked" him into fully embracing abstract art, toward which he had already been tending. Dating from 1931, Calder’s sculptures of discrete movable parts powered by motors were christened “mobiles” by Marcel Duchamp, a French pun meaning both "motion" and "motive." At the same time, Calder was also experimenting with self-supporting, static, abstract sculptures, dubbed "stabiles" by Jean Arp in 1932 to differentiate them from mobiles. Public commissions increasingly came his way in the 1960s. Notable examples are .125 for JFK Airport in 1957, Spirale for UNESCO in Paris 1958 and Trois disques, commissioned for Expo 67 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Calder's largest sculpture at 25.7 meters high was El Sol Rojo, constructed outside the Aztec Stadium for the 1968 Summer Olympics "Cultural Olympiad" events in Mexico City. Many of his public works were commissioned by renowned architects; I.M. Pei commissioned his La Grande Voile (1966), a 25-ton, 40-foot high stabile for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Part of Calder's repertoire includes pivotal stage sets for more than a dozen theatrical productions, including Nucléa, Horizon, and most notably, Martha Graham’s Panorama (1935), a production of the Erik Satie symphonic drama Socrate (1936), and later, Works in Progress (1968). In addition to sculptures, Calder painted throughout his career, beginning in the early 1920s. He picked up his study of printmaking in 1925, and continued to produce illustrations for books and journals.As Calder’s professional reputation expanded in the late 1940s and 1950s, so did his production of prints. Masses of lithographs based on his gouache paintings hit the market, and deluxe editions of plays, poems, and short stories illustrated with fine art prints by Calder became available for sale. One of Calder's most celebrated and unconventional undertakings was a commission from Dallas-based Braniff International Airways to paint a full-size Douglas DC-8-62 four-engined jet as a "flying canvas." Calder created over 2,000 pieces of jewelry over the course of his career, many of them as gifts for friends and relatives. For his lifelong friend Joan Miró, he set a shard of a broken porcelain vessel in a brass ring. Peggy Guggenheim received enormous silver mobile earrings and later commissioned a hammered silver headboard...
Category

1930s American Modern M.C. (Maurits Cornelius) Escher Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

WPA-Era Central City, Colorado, 1930s Modernist Lithograph, Cityscape 3/25
By Arnold Rönnebeck
Located in Denver, CO
This 1933 lithograph, Central City, Colorado 3/25, by Arnold Rönnebeck, captures the architectural essence of a historic mining town during the Great Depression. Rendered in black an...
Category

1930s American Modern M.C. (Maurits Cornelius) Escher Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Lovers with a Tiger - Lithograph, Maeght 1977
By Richard Lindner
Located in Paris, IDF
Richard LINDNER Lovers with a Tiger Original lithograph, 1977 Printed signature in the plate On heavy paper 76 x 56 cm (c. 30 x 22 inch) Created for the artist exhibition in Maeght ...
Category

1970s American Modern M.C. (Maurits Cornelius) Escher Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Previously Available Items
Mosaic II - Lithograph by M.C. Escher - 1957
By M.C. Escher
Located in Roma, IT
Hand signed and numbered. Edition of 56 prints. Rare and in excellent conditions. References: Cat. Locher n.422
Category

1950s Modern M.C. (Maurits Cornelius) Escher Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

M.c. Escher figurative prints for sale on 1stDibs.

Find a wide variety of authentic M.C. Escher figurative prints available for sale on 1stDibs. You can also browse by medium to find art by M.C. Escher in woodcut print, lithograph and more. Much of the original work by this artist or collective was created during the 20th century and is mostly associated with the modern style. Not every interior allows for large M.C. Escher figurative prints, so small editions measuring 3 inches across are available. Customers who are interested in this artist might also find the work of Alejandro Colunga, Roland Topor, and Mahmoud Farshchian. M.C. Escher figurative prints prices can differ depending upon medium, time period and other attributes. On 1stDibs, the price for these items starts at $42,802 and tops out at $42,802, while the average work can sell for $42,802.
Questions About M.C. (Maurits Cornelius) Escher Figurative Prints
  • 1stDibs ExpertAugust 20, 2024
    To tell if an M. C. Escher print is real, examine its details with a magnifying glass. If you see any pixelation, the piece is likely a reproduction. Escher used lithographic techniques to produce his prints, and this method usually involves heavy paper with a noticeable grain and a thicker application of ink. As a result, smooth or glossy paper or fine, light linework typically indicates that a print is a copy. A certified appraiser or knowledgeable art dealer can further assist you with the authentication process. On 1stDibs, shop a collection of M. C. Escher art.

Recently Viewed

View All