LONG ISLAND CITY, N.Y. – “The Imagery of Chess Revisited,” onview at The Noguchi Museum from October 21 through March 5, is thefirst major museum exhibition to explore and reprise one of thelegendary events in the history of Twentieth Century arts: the1944-45 exhibition “The Imagery of Chess,” organized by surrealistmasters Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst for the Julien Levy Gallery,in New York City.
The two artists, both serious chess players, invited a “who’s who” of their avant-garde contemporaries to redesign the standard chess set or create works that otherwise explored the imagery and symbolism of chess. In addition to Duchamp and Ernst, participants included such famous European expatriates and soon-to-be famous American modernists as Alexander Calder, Arshile Gorky, Man Ray, Robert Motherwell, Isamu, Noguchi, Yves Tanguy and Dorothea Tanning. A resounding popular and critical success, the event marked a turning point in America’s embrace of modernism, which signaled the shift from Paris to New York as the proving ground for avant-garde art.
“The Imagery of Chess Revisited” reunites, for the first time in 60 years, some 40 works from this historic gallery show, including 12 of the original 13 chess sets, as well as numerous documentary photographs of the exhibition. Also on view will be approximately 40 additional chess-themed works by the show’s participants. Over the years, the objects included in the original exhibition became widely scattered and some of them were irretrievably lost. The latter are represented in the current exhibition by carefully researched reproductions.
By 1944, many leaders of the avant-garde in Europe had congregated in New York as refugees from Fascism and war, capturing the American public’s attention with their unconventional art and lifestyles and exerting a powerful influence on young American artists engaged in their own explorations of modernism.
Julien Levy, who opened his gallery on West 57th Street in 1931, was in the vanguard of American dealers who befriended these émigré artists and promoted the latest developments in both European and American art. He invited Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp to organize a group project on the theme of chess to be held in his gallery that winter, from December 12, 1944, through January 31, 1945.
Works by participants in the Levy show represent an astonishingly wide range of artistic styles, media and meanings. While some chose to create chess sets that explored formal problems of design and functionality, others created works that alluded, often in strikingly contemporary and personal ways, to the historical associations of chess as a game of war or as a metaphor for amorous conquest.
The exhibition includes 11 works by Duchamp, the acknowledged chess master of the group, including his tiny “Wallet Chess Set,” roughly six by four inches; a series of wall maquettes for various chess pieces, exhibited for first time since the Levy show; two copies of his book of endgame chess scenarios, Opposition and Sister Squares Are Reconciled, 1932, one inscribed by Duchamp, the other with a one-of-a-kind Plexiglas and wood veneer binding; and, shown publicly for the first time, letters and diagrams that Duchamp sent to Levy, offering advice on various chess problems.
For chess aficionados, one of the most historically important works on view, also included in the Levy show, is a wooden chess set made in 1924 by Bauhaus designer Josef Hartwig. The first modernist chess set to be commercially produced and distributed, it is still sold worldwide today.
Works by Alexander Calder include a whimsical chess set fashioned to found objects, including sofa legs and bat handles and a recently rediscovered portfolio of ribald, chess-inspired drawings entitled “Knightmares.” French Surrealist Andre Breton’s submission, another “found object” chess set, utilized glasses filled with varying amounts of red or white wine.
A number of works in the Levy show drew parallels between thegame of chess and the deadly serious war being played out in Europeand the Pacific. The most astonishing of these was a Surrealistassemblage by Swiss-born designer Xanti Schawinsky, meticulouslyreplicated from documentary photographs for the present exhibition,which featured a network of criss-crossing strips of clear Lucitesuspended above a table top chess set. Suggesting a chessboardunder aerial bombardment, the work was undoubtedly inspired bySchawinsky’s work for the US military.
French artist Jean Helion, recently escaped as a prisoner of war, created drawings of chess pieces wrapped in barbed wire. Seemingly a prescient warning of the horrors of war to come, Alberto Giacometti’s 1932 sculpture “On ne Joue plus (No More Play)” is a marble slab, pocked with fox holelike craters and barren except for two lone cemetery markers. While this work was not in the Levy exhibition, it was in the dealer’s private collection and doubtlessly inspired his own chessboard design.
Noguchi’s chess set and table, described by Newsweek as “the most beautiful piece in the [Levy] show,” is an early example of the artist’s translation of sculptural ideas into functional forms. The table, a recent acquisition by The Noguchi Museum, is made of joined pieces of black veneered plywood contoured into curving angular shapes. The original chess pieces, molded from red and green plastic, will be represented by replicas made especially for this exhibition. Also on view will be a series of Noguchi’s “biomorphic” sculptures, stylistic outgrowths of his 1944 chess ensemble.
Occupying a renovated industrial building dating from the 1920s, the Noguchi Museum, 32-37 Vernon Boulevard, comprises ten indoor galleries and an outdoor sculpture garden.
For information, www.noguchi.org.
