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.

Without reading the article, I don't believe that about Ernst. Surely he didn't look at chess so simplistically and childishly. It sounds like a glib, Time-style (Hughesian) version of art history.
- tom moody 11-18-2005 12:24 am [add a comment]