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But Duchamp, if not a chess grandmaster, was certainly far beyond average in his passion for the game and its theories. He was obsessed with chess problems and, in 1932, actually co-wrote a book on the game about obscure and unlikely endgame situations called "Opposition and Sister Squares Are Reconciled." And Duchamp got together with another chess-loving refugee from Europe, Max Ernst. Ernst, it seems, did not have the same kind of fascination with chess theory as Duchamp. He saw the game in more mythic terms: the clash of armies, the authority of royal figures, the weird metamorphosis of symbolic beings - part bird, part human, part fish - in other words, as a field in which the hybrid forms of his own painting and sculpture could also be displayed.

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