MC Escher review – hallucinatory insights from the mind-bending master

We think we know the world of Maurits Cornelis Escher with its mind-bending staircases and buildings that impossibly twist upon themselves. Yet a shocking glimpse of reality intrudes in Somerset House’s gripping journey through his metaverse: in 1945 Escher designed a diploma for students at a temporary academy in Eindhoven, recently liberated from Nazi rule.

Behind a wise old owl, twisting columns of black smoke rise from a riverside town, their sinuousness reflected in the water. The depiction of war shows Escher as a civilised individual surviving a brutal age and reminds us that his visual delights were grounded in what Galileo called "the language of mathematics" in which "the book of nature is written".

You do not have to be fluent in that language to lose yourself in his art. The exhibition lets you look far more closely than books and reproductions allow; at times you feel actually inside his paradoxical places.

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