Dutch artist Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972), renowned for his masterful drawings filled with labyrinthine staircases, illusionist motifs, and impossible perspectives that challenge our perception, has wielded an immense influence on popular and contemporary culture. Currently featured in a major retrospective at the Monnaie de Paris, Escher's works have inspired countless films, video games, animated series, contemporary art pieces, and musical creations spanning from Harry Potter to Squid Game.
While his name may not be universally known, Escher's images have invaded our collective imagination. Staircases where it's impossible to tell whether they ascend or descend, buildings without floors or ceilings, disturbing interlocking patterns, and hallucinatory distortions explain why his lithographs and masterful engravings achieved such success in the 1970s and continue to fascinate audiences today. At the intersection of art, illusionism, and the science of perception, these works appeal equally to geeks and lovers of classical art, captivating the minds of numerous filmmakers, comic book authors, video game creators, and artists.
Inspired by Italian Renaissance architecture, the patterns of Granada's Alhambra, optical illusions, and various mathematical objects like the Möbius strip and Penrose stairs, Escher's graphic fantasies have influenced a multitude of films, animated series, music videos, video games, sculptures, and contemporary art installations. His works repeat and transform infinitely, much like the patterns in his own drawings.
In the third installment of the popular "Night at the Museum" saga released in 2015, Larry Daley, the night guard at New York's Museum of Natural History where artworks come to life after dark, travels to the British Museum for new adventures. Among the animated works in this film is Escher's "Relativity." Ben Stiller's character pursues the story's villain inside a living 3D reproduction of this lithograph – the worst possible setting for trying to catch an enemy. A step becomes a wall, a wall becomes a walkway, the stairs make no sense, and space is fluid and elusive, leaving both characters and viewers as disoriented as those facing the artist's original works.
In the Harry Potter film series (2001-2011), numerous set designs draw inspiration from Escher's universe, perfect for embodying the mysteries of the occult. While the Ministry of Magic's hall and the prophecy room, with its rows of spheres repeated infinitely, are part of this influence, the most obvious example remains Hogwarts' moving staircases. These staircases, which move, pivot, and intersect in labyrinthine ways, evoke the artist's most famous works, including the lithograph "Relativity" (1953), which were themselves heavily inspired by Piranesi's "Imaginary Prisons," a famous series of engravings published in 1750 depicting hellish underground prisons where staircases and walkways intertwine.
Science fiction cinema is filled with references to Escher, beginning with Christopher Nolan's "Inception" (2010). This four-Oscar-winning visual masterpiece successfully gives form to the paradoxical universe of dreams and the distortions of reality operated by the mind, materializing physical spaces in perpetual transformation that defy earthly laws. The film contains a direct reference, acknowledged by the director, to the artist's impossible staircases, designed using Penrose's mathematical figure – particularly that of the print "Ascending and Descending" (1960), which loops endlessly without leading anywhere. Buildings folding in on themselves or multiplied as fractals, interlocking worlds and patterns make the entire film appear as a gigantic homage to Escher's universe.
Escher's labyrinthine universe, where one passes from level to level and which constitutes a challenge for the characters trapped within, lends itself particularly well to the video game world. While several games have drawn inspiration from his work, the one that feeds most deeply from it is undoubtedly "Monument Valley," created by Ustwo Games in 2014. With its strange and contemplative atmosphere where buildings defy the laws of physics, and where optical illusions, perspective manipulations, and structural transformations are at the heart of gameplay, Monument Valley makes Escher's most famous works interactive, including "Relativity," "Ascending and Descending," "Waterfall," "Convex and Concave," and "Belvedere."
Several contemporary artists flirting with illusionism continue to bring Escher's work to life. With his fragments of staircases nestled inside Greek busts, classical statues, or ruins, American sculptor Daniel Arsham has claimed to be inspired by him. Meanwhile, the illusionist installations "Infinite Staircase" (2020), "Building" (2014), and "Swimming Pool" (1999) by Argentine artist Leandro Erlich clearly draw from the Dutch master's universe through their manipulation of perception by proposing impossible visions. The same heritage appears in certain works by the Berlin duo Elmgreen & Dragset, such as "L'Addition," presented at Orsay in 2024, where characters walk on walls and ceilings, and "City in the Sky" (2019) – an upside-down city grafted to the ceiling of New York's main train station.
The music world has also largely succumbed to Escher's influence, whose infinitely repeated patterns and shifting perspectives perfectly evoke mesmerizing musical scores that allow one to lose themselves in another world. British singer-songwriter Kate Bush chose to include animated versions of several Escher lithographs in the music video for her song "Pi" from the album "Aerial" (2005): "Metamorphosis," "Circle Limit II and IV," "Predestination," "Encounter," "Air and Water," "Liberation," "Verbum," and "Day and Night." Numerous album covers have also reprinted his works, including "Flatworms" for Mandrake Memorial's album "Puzzle" (1970), "Reptiles" for Mott the Hoople's eponymous album (1969), "Three Worlds" for Beaver & Krause's "In a Wild Sanctuary" (1970), and "Bond" for Legend Killers' "Locked Inside" (1990). Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger, who wanted to do the same, was refused by the artist.
Playful by nature and based on drawing, many animated series have embraced Escher's visual games. Modified for each episode, The Simpsons' famous couch gag converts the staircases from the prints "Relativity" and "Ascending and Descending" into a pink and blue maze with impossible gravity for the episode "Simpson Horror Show XII" (2001), animated by Bill Plympton, in which a panicked Homer wanders. The "Roommate" episode (1999) of Futurama, during which Bender and Fry visit an apartment, also draws inspiration from these same two works, as do the humorous animated series "Family Guy" and "Rick and Morty."
In Jim Henson's 1986 fantasy film "Labyrinth," where David Bowie plays a cruel goblin king with punk hair, a young romantic girl escapes by reading fantasy tales. Her favorite book, "The Labyrinth," opens the doors to another world. Henson transposes Escher's universe to screen: impossible staircases, corridor mazes, and relative gravity plunge Sarah's character (played by Jennifer Connelly) into a disturbing and paradoxical universe. Like the prints "Relativity" and "Ascending and Descending," which he transposes in 3D, the film plays with perception and illusion, transforming each scene into a spatial challenge.
In his series of paintings titled "I Love Color," Congolese painter Chéri Samba draws inspiration from another very famous Escher work: the absurd and striking "Bond" (1956), which represents two faces peeled in spirals like oranges, floating in space. On his ultra-pop self-portraits with vivid colors, the artist represents himself "peeled" in the manner of the Dutch engraver's characters, with a brush between his teeth and background variations. This is a clever and powerful way for the artist to explore the complexity and construction of his identity, particularly the role played by his skin color – both accessory like fruit peel and unfortunately essential from a socio-historical perspective.
Dario Argento's Italian horror film "Suspiria" (1977) plunges a young woman played by Jessica Harper into a disturbing dance academy where mysterious murders occur. Impossible staircases, labyrinthine corridors, and walls adorned with motifs directly inspired by Escher's works (like his famous interlocking birds) transform the hotel into an oppressive visual trap. Horror, flamboyant colors, and spatial illusions create a fascinating Escherian ballet.
The comic book world has also fallen into Escher's nets. In his album "Delirius" (1972), created with Jacques Lob and part of the saga devoted to interstellar navigator Lone Sloane, artist Philippe Druillet plunges the reader into a baroque cosmos where vertiginous staircases, labyrinthine cities, and impossible perspectives directly evoke the Dutch artist. His futuristic vessels and gravity-defying walkways transform each page into a visual maze, mixing vertigo, fantastic architecture, and adventure.
Designed by designer Chae Kyoung-sun, the labyrinthine staircase of the South Korean series "Squid Game" (2021), an endless maze of corridors, landings, and steps, draws direct inspiration from Escher's "Relativity." Prisoners of an infernal spiral, the participants of the macabre game advance in single file under the eye of cameras and armed guards, not knowing where they are or where they're going. With its childish and pop colors that contrast with the cruel reality of the game (a fight to the death for money), this set – which also evokes architect Ricardo Bofill's Muralla Roja near Alicante – brilliantly embodies the intrigue in which the characters are entangled while criticizing the flaws of the society that pushed them to register and thus lock themselves in this totalitarian hell, where the promise of social ascension is only an illusion dragging them ever lower into the abyss of human condition.
