Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst, The Theater of Dream-Chess
Valery Oisteanu
"The Imagery of Chess Revisited" is an unusual exhibit at the Noguchi Museum that explores and recreates, for the first time in 60 years, one of the legendary events in the history of surrealism: the 1944-45 exhibition of the same name, organized by Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst for the Julien Levy Gallery.
Duchamp had a long and intense interest in chess. In his later years he largely abandoned art in favor of studying the "endgame scenarios" of chess. Max Ernst and Man Ray also had a passion for the game and used it in their art, as in surreal-chess played with a blindfold, a pretext for chance-operations and mental performances by a team of two artists in a séance and observed by their co-conspirators, the audience.
Levy invited a virtual "who’s who" of artists and other members of the cultural avant-garde to redesign the standard chess set or otherwise explore chess imagery and its symbolism in new and different ways. Participants included famous European expatriates and soon-to-be famous American modernists. André Breton and Nicolas Callas utilized found wine glasses filled with varying amounts of red and white wine; Alexander Calder fashioned a wood set made from found furniture and a set made from bent metal and screws; Ernst produced a bronze set of shamanistic objects, while Man Ray’s turned out an ode to romantic Bauhaus utilizing violin pieces; Isamu Noguchi created plastic tripodian biomorphic aliens and Yves Tanguy employed an undersea-like simplicity to a set.
In addition, John Cage and Vittorio Rieti created original musical scores. Dorothea Tanning, Arshile Gorky, David Hare, Matta, Robert Motherwell and others produced pivotal chess-related paintings, sculptures and photographic works. Sculptures would seem to be the best medium to convey the stream of thoughts elicited by the game. One dream-like work by Ernst features a bronze king holding a chess-set queen and is called The King Playing with the Queen (1944-54), an allusion to his affair with Dorothea Tanning, who painted for the same occasion End Game, a satin shoe crashing into a bishop’s miter. There is also the mysterious bronze sculpture, Magician’s Game (1944), by David Hare, Dali-esque in its insanely stretching lines.
Still, works on paper or canvas dominate the show, including six drawings by Calder (1944) with poetic titles suggested by Duchamp (for example, the Knightmare portfolio), plus intriguing drawings by Robert Motherwell and Arshile Gorky.
The original show marked a turning point in America’s understanding of avant-garde, signaling a shift from Paris to New York and from "art for the retina" to "art for the mind." The current two-level exhibit goes beyond yesterday’s successes, reuniting some 80 chess sets and 40 chess-themed works, including many of the original chess sets, to also offer seven new ones created specially by art-students from Pratt, Parsons and the School of Visual Arts. Among them, the very innovative Life Chess set by Jean Su Maeng, featuring futuristic characters wrapped in translucent spandex and light shining from within; a clay sculptural object by Christine Hagar; white clay swan-bishops by Brian Thomas; Edie Chiu’s polished wooden set with a magnetic semi-sphere at the bottom that rocks back and forth while played; and Patricia Tower’s small geometric figures reminiscent of Noguchi’s pieces of sculpture at the Yale Library.
"The Imagery of Chess Revisited" is also the title of a catalog edited by Larry List, the guest curator. The publication has new color photographs as well as rarely seen archives, previously unpublished works and recollections by participants. An essay by Larry List explores the chess designs as visual objects and pivotal creations in the context of the participating artists’ lives and work. Lowell Cross and Paul B. Franklin examine the two musical scores included in the show, and Ingrid Schaffner provides an introduction to the "avant-garde zeitgeist" in which the original show took place.
According to museum director Jenny Dixon, this is the first time the facility used wall text and practically transformed the second floor of the museum into a multi-media dream theater of surreal-chess, especially with Noguchi as a stellar player.
