When the Duchamp family of exceptional artists were living together in the Normandy countryside, the older brothers played chess, their parents and their visiting friends played cards, two of the daughters and Madame Duchamp played music, and the two middle children, Suzanne and Marcel, teased each other affectionately, sharing the secrets that would seal their bond. It was during his childhood that Duchamp developed his taste for chess and games involving hazard and chance. Games, then, in Jacques Villon’s yard in Puteaux, became a subject for portraits painted during his teens (The Chess Game, 1910; Philadelphia Museum of Art), and when Duchamp liberated himself from the family circle during his American exile several years later, chess became his passion. Throughout his life he played on a daily basis, like a painter heading to work in the studio alone, every day.
Duchamp admitted it straight away: he much preferred playing chess with professionals, whom he considered the real artists, than keeping company in the art world and acting the part of the painter or ‘cinematographer’. Even before he became a professional chess player himself, he encountered other chess fanatics, besides his brothers, like Walter Arensberg and Man Ray.
During his stay in Buenos Aires in 1919, where he joined a local chess club, he acquired his professional know-how by cutting out games from the newspaper and mastering the system developed by the extremely popular Cuban chess player José Raúl Capablanca.
He also developed a method that allowed him to continue playing chess by correspondence with his patron Walter Arensberg in New York. If he sometimes played the dilettante where artistic practice was concerned, he was deadly serious about his engagement with chess: ‘I am all set to become a chess maniac. I find all around me transformed into knight or queen, the outside world holds no other interest for me than in its transposition into winning or losing scenarios.’1 When he returned to New York in 1922, his friend Henri-Pierre Roché encouraged him to continue his artistic research, but Duchamp responded quite firmly:
No, I really don’t feel like broadening my horizons. When I get a little money, I will do different things. But I don’t think that the few hundred francs or whatever cash I would get out of it could make up for the hassle of seeing this reproduced for the public. I’ve had it up to here with becoming a painter or a cinematographer. The only thing that could arouse my interest right now is a wonder drug that would make me play chess divinely. That would really turn me on.2
Indeed, less than one year later, in 1923, he spread the rumour that he had abandoned painting, leaving his major work, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even, unfinished.
From the point of this rupture on, Duchamp officially placed his artistic adventures second; they were to distract him from his daily chess games only sporadically. A member of the French Chess Federation, Duchamp participated in professional tournaments in Brussels, Monte Carlo, Chamonix, Grenoble, Nice, Hamburg and Rouen, where he was a member of the local chess circle.3 In these championships, he eagerly confronted internationally renowned professionals like Frank James Marshall, George Koltanowski and Savielly Tartakower: ‘Koltanowski and I have a small office down-town where he receives his mail and is playing about 50 matches at the moment.’4 Up until 1939, Duchamp, who was a writing and publishing enthusiast, tended to the chess rubric in the newspaper Ce Soir, which was run by Louis Aragon. He also published a treatise on chess that he had written with the German master Viatli Halberstadt in 1932. After the French publishing house NRF turned down the manuscript, he sent it to a Brussels-based publisher, Edmond Lancel of the Editions de l’Echiquier, who agreed to publish it in French, German and English. Marcel worked on the book and cover design and selected the paper, and devised, as with his other publishing ventures, a de-luxe edition (of 30) and an ordinary one entitled L’Opposition et les cases conjuguées réconciliées par M. Duchamp & V. Halberstadt (The Opposition and the Sister Squares are Reconciled by M. Duchamp & V. Halberstadt). While it was not a huge commercial success, the infinitely useless and absurd aspect of his initiative amused Duchamp: ‘Even the chess champions don’t read the book, since the problem it poses really only comes up once in a lifetime. They’re end-game problems of possible games but so rare as to be nearly utopian.’5
In light of all this, what is the link between the artist’s unfailing attraction for chess and his life as a ‘professional’ artist, which he almost always treated with disdain? Duchamp responded to that question himself by designing the poster for the 1925 chess championships in Nice, which he participated in, and by designing and creating chess pieces and miniature chess games. On 23 July 1944, he asked his friend Man Ray:
Did you get the pocket chess set? I’m making (myself) 50 or so of them and then the American market will be exhausted. Too much labour involved to want to launch a grand-scale production and chess players don’t want to pay huge prices for a pocket chess set.6
At the time, the Nice championships poster was plastered all over France and sold by the newspaper L’Eclaireur du Soir for 100 francs! Needless to say, today it is a highly sought-after object.
In 1951 Duchamp went even further and surprised his friends and disciples by welcoming a young historian and professor from Toronto, Michel Sanouillet, who had written a doctoral dissertation on Dada, into the fold. Once Sanouillet paid a visit to Duchamp’s downtown New York studio and Marcel asked him to wait while he finished his chess game. The young historian, who would become Duchamp’s friend, agreed, but was astounded to discover that Duchamp was playing against a naked woman. He immediately grasped the audacity of Duchamp’s gesture and that this exceedingly Dada-esque greeting was a true demonstration of friendship and respect. In 1963 Duchamp reiterated the peformance in Pasadena on the occasion of his first retrospective exhibition. A well-known photograph shows Duchamp in deep concentration facing an entirely undressed Eve Babitz, her face hidden by her hair.
When Duchamp died in 1968, the American Chess Foundation, to which Duchamp and his wife Teeny belonged, printed an obituary in the New York Times:
The officers and Board of Trustees of the American Chess Foundation record a deep sense of loss at the passing of Marcel Duchamp. A giant in the world of art, he was also an important influence in the world of chess and was for many years an irreplaceable member of our Board of Directors. We take immeasurable pride in his association with us.
The intellectual mastery inherent to chess, the passion for play and competition, and above all the apprehension of the world through the filter of relativity, which is symbolized by the black and white squares of the chessboard, matched Duchamp’s frame of mind and offered him an abiding opportunity for satisfying his untiring quest for meaning. The rigour of the game, the concentration and detachment needed to face his tough opponents, all helped him to forge his trademark Duchampian temperament, which friends and historians have rightly related to alchemy, esotericism and Zen thought.
Duchamp was always sceptical about the occult sciences and paranormal phenomena such as hypnosis or the photographic revelation of immortal spirits.7 And while he may have flirted with them, he said he preferred that these metaphysical dimensions and mysteries spring up spontaneously and remain invisible. Naturally, we are well aware that Duchamp favoured science, one of his other passions. But it is also clear that Duchamp, in his endless quest to define a new morality and firmly, but delicately, to break down prejudice, seems to have paid consistent attention to intimate and profound forces and resources of an eminently spiritual tenor.
To my mind, the Duchamp represented in the following pages – the ‘Duchamp of with my Tongue in my Cheek’ – fits with this vision of life and creation. For in addition to his outstanding clear-sightedness and intelligence, his meticulous and precise gestures, the lightning rapidity of his eye as he seized his prey (the readymades), one must not forget his kindness, his love, his self-awareness and his awareness of others, and the humour he cultivated scrupulously, all of which fascinated those who crossed his path.