Day and Night was Escher’s most popular print: during the course of his lifetime, he made more than 650 copies of it, painstakingly rendering each impression with the help of a small egg spoon made of bone. In Britain, for instance, it appears that only a single work by Escher belongs to a public collection: the woodcut Day and Night, which presents two flocks of birds, one black and one white, flying above a flat Dutch landscape in between a pair of rivers. Moreover, despite the popularity of his fastidious optical illusions, Escher continues to suffer from snobbery within the realm of fine art, where his output is often denigrated as little more than technically accomplished graphic design.

Yet, if we’re honest, how much do most of us really know about its creator, the Dutch printmaker MC Escher (1898-1972)? The truth is that outside his homeland Escher remains something of an enigma. Since the original lithograph was produced in the summer of 1953, Relativity – which belongs to a series of five prints by the same artist also featuring impossible constructions and multiple vanishing points – has been reproduced countless times on posters, mugs, T-shirts, items of stationery and even duvet covers.

It must be one of the most familiar images in modern art: a space-distorting interior that could never exist in reality, dominated by staircases sprouting surreally in all directions, and filled with expressionless, mannequin-like figures walking up and down like members of a religious order calmly going about their daily business.

Enigma album art