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Artist or Maker: Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968)

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Provenance: Robert Lebel, Paris, until 1972.
Xavier Fourcade, New York, by 1973.
Fischer Fine Art Ltd., London (no. F11,763).
Ronny Van de Velde, Antwerp, by 1991.
Galerie 1900-2000, Paris (no. F322).
Acquired from the above by the previous owner; sale, Christie's, New York, 9 November 1999, lot 536.
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner.

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Exhibited: Munich, Haus der Kunst, Der Surrealismus 1922-1942, March - May 1972, no. 137 (illustrated); this exhibition later travelled to Paris, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Le Surréalisme, June - September 1972, no. 132.
Philadelphia, Museum of Art, Marcel Duchamp, September - November 1973, no. 186; this exhibition later travelled to New York, The Museum of Modern Art, December 1973 - February 1974, and Chicago, The Art Institute, March - April 1974.
Antwerp, Ronny van de Velde, Marcel Duchamp, September - December 1991, no. 94 (illustrated).
Majorca, Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró, Amb l'adjuda dels meus amics, December 1992.
Rome, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Dada, l'arte della negazione, April - June 1994, no. VIII/25 (illustrated p. 327).
Schwerin, Staatliches Museum, Marcel Duchamp Respirateur, August - November 1995 (illustrated p. 71).

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Literature: R. Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, New York, 1967, no. 218, p. 198.
Y. Arman, Marcel Duchamp Plays and Wins, New York, 1984.
A. Schwartz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, vol. 2, New York, 1997, no. 453 (illustrated p. 741).

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Notes: THE PROPERTY OF A PRIVATE EUROPEAN COLLECTOR

Please note this work is sold with an accompanying photograph taken by Joly and Chardot of Marcel Duchamp pictured with Chessboard hanging on the wall of his studio.

In the early 1920s, a rumor quickly circulated throughout the American and European art world that the celebrated French painter, Marcel Duchamp--who was best known for the controversy that had surrounded the showing of his Nude Descending a Staircase at the Armory Show in 1913--quit making art in order to play chess. Whereas the account was within the artistic communities of New York and Paris, it is true that he made a conscious decision to stop painting, and that he increasingly devoted more and more of his time to playing the game of chess.
Indeed, in the early 1920s, after having abandoned the most ambitious work he had attempted to that point in his career--The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (best know by its abbreviated title: the Large Glass), which he had worked on intermittently in New York from 1915 through 1923--Duchamp returned to Europe and seems to have seriously contemplated the possibility of becoming a professional chess player. Over the course of the next twenty years, he engaged in regular tournament play and, for a brief period, was considered one of the strongest players on the French national team. Both pursuits--painting and chess playing--were activities taught to him by his older brothers, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Jacques Villon. In 1910, he painted The Chess Game (Philadelphia Museum of Art; Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection), a large canvas in bright Fauve colors depicting his brothers intently engaged in a game of chess, their wives relaxing in the lush garden setting of their home and studio in Puteaux. A year later, when Duchamp began his first experiments with Cubism, he again turned to chess as his subject, executing a series of drawings and two paintings entitled Portrait of Chess Players, images that, again, depict his brothers intently engaged in a game of chess. But in this series, Duchamp was not content to blindly follow the dictates of a predetermined Cubist style. 'I wanted to invent or find my own way,' he recalled years later, 'instead of being the plain interpreter of a theory'. His solution was to fuse the subject of his earlier painting of his brothers playing chess with the movements and action of the chess game itself, thereby rendering physical the product of an essentially cerebral activity (the opposite approach of most Cubist painters, who generally departed from the visual analysis of a purely concrete form).

Throughout his life, Duchamp was committed to challenging the authority of an old French saying, 'Bête comme un peintre' ['Stupid like a painter'], which presumed that painting was a totally mindless activity. 'I was interested in ideas," he said of his paintings of the Cubist period. I wanted to put painting once again at the service of the mind.' Indeed, Duchamp accomplished this (and more) when he introduced the concept of the readymade, where commonplace everyday objects were elevated to the status of art by virtue of having been selected and signed by the artist. As is well known today, Duchamp chose an assortment of artifacts to serve as his first readymades--bicycle wheels, bottle racks, a snow shovel, etc... --but with chess and art forming such an important part of his everyday activities, it was inevitable that he would one day consider a chessboard as a candidate for inclusion within this same special class of objects.

Wherever Duchamp lived, a chessboard was always close at hand. In 1937, he hung a blank wood chessboard onto the wall of his studio, which, according to Robert Lebel (Duchamp's biographer and the first historian to compile a catalogue raisonné of the artist's work), Duchamp used to facilitate the playing of 'mental chess games.' It is perhaps no mere coincidence that the square format of the board defined a position on the wall that--at least in most artists' studios--would have been occupied by a painting. A photograph taken in 1967 shows Duchamp in his Neuilly studio, standing next to his Chessboard (the present work), which hangs prominently on the wall and--considering the fact that he was still famous for having quit painting--is an alluring visual metaphor for the career he so completely and effectively abandoned almost exactly a half century earlier.

For Duchamp, the cerebral activities in which he engaged while viewing his readymade Chessboard might have been--for him--the equivalent of looking at an especially beautiful drawing. Evidence for such an interpretation can be found in a statement that he made in 1952 before an annual meeting of the New York State Chess Association:
'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. The design thus formed on the chessboard has apparently no visual aesthetic value and is more like a score for music which can be played again and again. Beauty in chess does not seem to be a visual experience as in painting. 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... 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.'

We thank Frances Naumann for his preparation of this essay.

No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 17.5% will be added to the buyer's premium, which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis.