Chess has inspired countless works of art. But is chess actually art?
Artists often rely on intuition when creating their work. Intuition helps painters select the perfect tone or hue, and it guides photographers as they frame their shot. Even dancers credit their moves to intuition. Chess, too, has its moments of intuition.
Modernists and Chess
The ancient game of chess has inspired art in many different forms. From the evocative Queen’s Gambit set by Damien Hirst to the stealth chess of the Discworld novels and the three-dimensional chess of Star Trek, the board game has found its way into paintings, sculptures, photographs, film and books.
One of the most intriguing ways that chess has appeared in art is through its representation as a game of strategy and competition. Since painting and chess have much in common – both require discipline, focus and visualisation skills – it is perhaps not surprising that the game has featured in many paintings.
Modern art, however, has taken a different approach to chess as its subject. The modern movement – which started with Art Nouveau and the Secession in Europe, Decorative Art and Jugendstil in Germany and Holland, Impressionism and Expressionism, Futurism and Cubism, and later Dada and Surrealism – all challenged old-fashioned ideas of what art should be. The result was a series of trends in design – some of which were reflected in the design of chess pieces, others that were completely new and radically different from the traditional Staunton form.
Man Ray, a pioneer of Surrealist photography and a friend of Duchamp’s, was another early avant-garde artist to feature the game in his works. His dreamy, often absurd photographs and paintings play with shapes and scale and use unexpected combinations of bodies and objects.
Duchamp and Chess
Many people, even those who admire Duchamp’s readymades and consider him to be a major figure in modern art, have tended to underestimate his chess aestheticism. This was a very serious aspect of his artistic philosophy and he used it to condemn the art of his time for its excessive attachment to the purely retinal.
Chess was one of the most important of Duchamp’s life’s hobbies. He was taught the game by his brothers Raymond and Jacques, and he played regularly with the Puteaux group of Cubist artists, including Francis Picabia. When he moved to New York, he was a regular at the late-night chess salons held by the Arensbergs.
In a letter to his friend Man Ray, he wrote: “If I had the choice of being an artist or a chess player I would be a chess player”. This shows how important he considered chess to be.
The chess set he designed, for example, reflects this thinking-space dimension of the game. He aimed to create pieces that emphasized the ‘spectral sequence and tonal rank’ of the chessboard, and he did not want to merely replicate the purely retinal aspect of a standard chess set. He wanted to make a piece of chess art, and this is exactly what he achieved. The piece, now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, was designed in 1913, and is an impressive and intriguing study in cubist abstraction.
Levy and Chess
Although a third rate chess player himself, Man Ray was fascinated by the game. It gave him the structure he needed to organize his unique view of the world and allowed him to create the foundations for his art.
Levy’s 1944-45 “Imagery of Chess” exhibition was the first time a gallery had attempted to bring together modernist artists with a common interest in the game of chess. He invited a diverse group of artists including European expatriates, such as Max Ernst, Alexander Calder and Xanti Schawinsky, and American modernists like Dorothea Tanning and Isamu Noguchi to participate.
Many of these artists created chess sculptures and paintings that celebrated the beauty of the game and the way in which it reflects our own lives, relationships, and conflicts. A few, such as John Cage and Vittorio Rieti, did not love the game but found ways to incorporate its themes into their work.
Levy’s cast plaster chess board incorporated his appreciation of both Eastern and Western stylistic traditions. He inscribed a forced perspective grid in the surface of his squares and embedded lustrous mother of pearl seashells into the center of each pawn. The board also reflected his fascination with Indian culture and art. Noguchi’s sculptural pieces for the show featured individual personality traits, breaking down the hierarchy of traditional chess pieces and adding to the theatricality of play.
Noguchi and Chess
Isamu Noguchi, who designed a chess table that the furniture maker Herman Miller began making commercially in 1944, was among the artists invited by gallery owner Julien Levy to submit playable chess sets or chess-inspired works for an exhibition called “The Imagery of Chess.” It ran in New York in 1944. Expat Surrealists such as Yves Tanguy, Man Ray and Andre Breton, along with such younger New Yorkers as Dorothea Tanning, Robert Motherwell and John and Xenia Cage, responded to Levy’s call, creating an array of artistic reactions to the game.
While Duchamp was the most formally experimental of the bunch, Noguchi was perhaps the most aesthetically compelling. His chess table, for example, had a clean, modern look that made it more palatable to non-artists than the abstracted wooden shapes of the other pieces in the show.
The museum re-staged the 1944 show in 2005, and called it “The Imagery of Chess Revisited.” One of the original tables is on view, and most of the other original chess sets are represented by carefully researched reproductions. The show also includes several archival images, as well as recollections from participants and period reviews. An essay by Larry List explores the chess designs as both visual objects and pivotal creations in their artists’ lives and careers. A number of works by the other participants are also included, including a set crafted from found objects by Calder and another made with glass that resembles the transparent, translucent Plexiglas used by Noguchi.
