Marcel Duchamp

''All chess players are artists.''

                        Marcel Duchamp

The chessboard holds a special place in the work of Marcel Duchamp, whose attitude towards art and general way of thinking largely revolved around the concept of chess. What in Duchamp's mind linked art and chess is that he saw them both as types of free mental activity, requiring intellectual precision and rigour. As he understood art as an intellectual rather than aesthetic discipline, he saw in the game of chess a perfect metaphor for artistic activity.

Duchamp himself excelled at the game, he joined several chess clubs in Europe and America, often playing every evening, as well as participating in tournaments and Chess Olympiads. His love for the game began very early in his life, dating back to the age of thirteen, when his brothers taught him painting as well as chess. The game became such an important subject and a source of inspiration for his art, that ultimately the two became almost inseparable. In the early stages of his career he often painted the subject of chess figures and players, from a 1910 oil depicting his brothers playing a game of chess, to the cubist compositions Portrait of Chess Players (fig. 2) and The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes (fig. 3).

When he arrived in New York in 1915, Duchamp often played chess with Walter Arensberg, who was to become one of his major supporters and collectors of his art. In a letter dated 3^rd May 1919 to his friends, the Stettheimer sisters, he wrote: 'It's a long time that I've been wanting to write you. But I haven't been able to find the time: my attention is so completely absorbed by chess. I play night and day and nothing in the world interests me more than finding the right move ... I like painting less and less' (quoted in Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, London, 1969, p. 58). In the 1920s, Duchamp famously abandoned painting for chess, which became not only a game, but one of the seminal themes of his art, which found its expression in a number of innovative art forms, such as in his 1943 rectified readymade Pocket Chess Set.

According to Arturo Schwarz, this Chessboard was certainly made by Duchamp sometime during the years he worked in his New York studio between 1943 and 1966, most likely circa 1946 (A. Schwarz, op. cit., 1997, p. 783). This unique piece anticipates a set of 30 chessboards Duchamp executed in 1966, issued to be sold for the benefit of the Marcel Duchamp Fund of the American Chess Foundation. In 1944, he participated in the group exhibition held at the Julien Levy Gallery, titled The Imagery of Chess, alongside other avant-garde artists such as André Breton, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Yves Tanguy, John Cage, Arshile Gorky and Matta, many of whom developed a passion for chess under Duchamp's influence. Julien Levy explained Duchamp's obsession with chess: 'Marcel wanted to show that an artist's mind, if it wasn't corrupted by money or success, could equal the best in any field. He thought that, with its sensitivity to images and sensations, the artist's mind could do as well as the scientific mind with its mathematical memory. He came damn close, too' (quoted in A. Schwarz, op. cit., 1969, p. 66).

In a speech given to the New York State Chess Association in August 1952, Duchamp declared: 'Objectively, a game of chess looks very much like a pen-and-ink drawing, with the difference, however, that the chess player paints with black-and-white forms already prepared instead of inventing forms as does the artist [...] Beauty in chess is closer to beauty in poetry; the chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chessboard, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem. Actually, I believe that every chess player experiences a mixture of two aesthetic pleasures, first the abstract image akin to the poetic idea of writing, second the sensuous pleasure of the ideographic execution of that image on the chessboards. From my close contact with artists and chess players I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists' (ibid., p. 68).

After Duchamp's death, his widow Alexina presented this Chessboard to Lois Long, a musician and artist who was a friend of Duchamp and John Cage, and a well known figure in the New York artistic circles.