Finally, Paul Klee's The Great Chess Game and Juan Gris's Chess Pieces iconographically evoke the theme of artistic resourcefulness through the image of chess. Klee's painting, rendered in the German Expressionist style, arranges the canvas into a kind of pattern or code of colored squares that take the form of a chessboard. This compositional system of squares recalls Kandinsky's notion of a codified language of abstraction, especially when we consider how the runic pieces are cryptographically evocative of hidden meaning. These pieces seem to spell out an abstract game position that makes no real sense in terms of actual chess, but plenty of sense in terms of artistic pattern and compositional arrangement.

- bill 1-30-2011 10:18 pm





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