Considering the possibility

Anybody who's read The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn, as I did recently, will recall the Duke and the King, the pair of chancers who hitch up with Huck and Jim on their trip down the Mississippi, stopping off at every small town on the way to try out some scheme or other with the intention of relieving the inhabitants of their money.

These schemes tended, of course, to the illegal, and one can never imagine either Ray Keene or CJ de Mooi doing anything so improper. Nevertheless, with the book so fresh in my mind, I was curiously reminded of Twain's two characters when I came across the latest nonsense from my favourite Twitter account.

Uh huh. Ray is a working journalist and he likes to be the first to break big news. And news it certainly will have been, to the ECF at any rate. Or at least any member of the ECF other than the organisation's President.

So what's Ray's response? He's thinking it over, so he tells us. He's considering the possibility.

Considering the possibility. What "possibility" means, precisely, is not entirely clear, since the post is not actually in Mr de Mooi's gift. So Ray may as well consider the possibility of being offered the presidency of the World Bank. Or the possibility of playing in the Olympiad team. Or the possibility of faster-than-light travel.

Which does raise the question of what CJ and Ray were up to. Testing the water? Just a joke? Well, just a couple of jokers at any rate, since one of them has not been a member of the ECF for more than twenty years, after being accused of misappropriating that organisation's funds, while the other has rather more recently been accused of mispresenting his personal contribution to the 2011 British Championships and of organising financial support for players in such a way that a proper accounting of the tournament's funds cannot be made.

We seem to have hitched up, one way or another, with CJ de Mooi and Ray Keene. Or at least we hitched up with CJ and he hitched up with Ray. And as Huckleberry Finn found out, once you're hitched up with them, it's not so easy to shake them off.

Huck, in the novel, is finally liberated from the Duke and the King when one set of townsfolk, tipped off about them in advance, tar and feather them both and run them out of town on a rail. We do things, usually, in a more civilised way now. But what to do about our two jokers? Seeing as Ray is already, as it were, out of town, might it be best if he stayed there? And as for CJ - is it not time he were thanked for his services and asked if he would prefer to pursue his interests somewhere else?


[LATE SQUIRMING NEWS: Ray blames readers' "inability to read" what he did not write.]


[Huckleberry Finn illustrations: The Children's Nursery, Wikipedia]

[Ray Keene index]
[CJ index]

Chess in Art Postscript: There's Nothing Like Gérôme Cooking

Over the last two Saturdays we have been tucking into Thomas Eakins' masterpiece The Chess Players of 1876, now in New York's Museum of Modern Art.

A number of observers have commented that its compositional arrangement owes a lot to Jean-Léon Gérôme's 1859 work showing Arnauts at recreation, also with a board game, which is in the Wallace Collection in London.
Maybe the similarity is not too surprising as Eakins was Gérôme's pupil in Paris for two years in the late 1860s. Gérôme's influence on Eakins composition is clear to see.

Last week we left this question bubbling away: what exactly are those Arnauts up to? What's their game?

The Wallace Collection - where the Arnauts can be seen in the flesh - label it "Arnauts Playing Draughts". Now, far be it from me, your humble S&BCBlogger, to question the conclusions of such an illustrious institution, but that didn't seem quite right.

So, two years ago (sorry, it has taken so long to get round to reporting this; I got blogged down in other things, but that's another story) I asked the Wallace Collection what made them think it was draughts, and they referred me to the authoritative catalogue of their collection by John Ingamells which says:

"The game [in the painting] is played with cylindrical pieces of various heights and shapes; the related drawing...appears to show counters. Gérôme also painted oriental figures playing chess with European pieces."

Which naturally leads us to ask to see the "related drawing", please. Well here it is; from the Sterling and Francine Clark Institute of Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Obviously that is two of the three Arnauts in the Wallace Collection painting, the two necessary for a successful game of...well, something or other...and as Ingamells says, they appear to be using counters.

Yes, apparently so, but does that mean the "counters" were "draught counters"? They could be "chess counters" couldn't they? For example, just look at this chess set from the 11th Century Middle East, in the British Museum, with its "cylindrical pieces of various heights and shapes":

So I asked again, and the Wallace acknowledged that "there certainly seems to have been some debate over the years over whether they are playing chess or draughts", and kindly sent me a JPEG of the Gérôme...(for which, thanks)...as if that settled the matter.

What's odd about this is that all the other authorities refer to the Wallace Collection painting as "Arnauts jouant aux échecs" in spite of what the Wallace says, for example Gerard Ackerman in his authoritative Gerome's Life and Work (2000). And what is even odder is that Ackerman also refers to the Clark drawing, where he says "ils jouent aux dames (i.e. draughts) et non aux échecs". So the Gérôme expert agrees with the Wallace on one hand (about the drawing)...but disagrees on the other (about the picture). There's not much hope for the rest of us.

Anyway, Ackerman is extremely helpful in listing the other three chess paintings that Gérôme executed, some of which he describes as pastiches - not pejoratively, but only to indicate that while they are not exact copies, they are derivative.

So here it is: the full-on Gérôme Échecs Éxperience. Jean-Léon is cooking with gas. Enjoy!

We start with the most sumptuous, and perhaps the most startling: both players are women. It was painted when Gérôme was in London around 1870, and is pretty much modelled compositionally on the Wallace Arnauts. The chess set is suspiciously counter-like.

Almées jouant aux échecs (1870)
Private Collection

Almehs it seems, were a superior class of female singer, dancer and entertainer (I suppose that means in the widest sense) in Egypt, but disinclined, I'll wager, to let some tooled-up Albanian chancer make an easy score.

The next one is almost a bit too small in this image to see clearly, but the chess is over there in the right-hand corner, with usual trio of players, though this time Gérôme seems more interested in the townscape.

Une Partie d'échecs (1870-3)
Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University, Connecticut.

Finally, another re-working of the principal composition, with the squatting white-skirted figure making his customary appearance:

Une Partie d'échecs (1870)
Isaac Delgado Museum. New Orleans

Of all the four Gérôme chess paintings this is perhaps the most claustrophobic in atmosphere; the most hermetic and secretive; the most sinister. Another Arnaud has joined the gang - maybe they aren't playing a game at all, but are using the board to plan a bit of random mayhem.

And that, (in case you missed it, there was a clear sighting in the last one of a familiar chess set, the "European pieces" mentioned by the Wallace) would seem to be that.

But not quite. I recently stumbled on this:

...with not one, but two standard-issue chess sets in play (is he giving a simul?). It is by another French "Orientalist", Alexandre Bida (1813-1895), a member of the prestigious Salon and fêted in his time. It was reproduced in the Illustrated London News in 1859, which commented that Bida produced "the effect of colour with colourless materials" - it's in black crayon. Exquisite.

Like Gérôme, Bida travelled widely in the Middle East and North Africa recording the locals with scrupulous ethnographic zeal. If he shows them playing with European pieces, you can be sure that is what they were using.

And finally, a bonbon to round off this three part Eakins/Gérôme sequence: it shows that crusty old Gérôme, pillar of the French art establishment, opponent of Impressionism, had a soft centre. Here is his entry in a competition for advertising signs.

Optician's Sign (1902)
Private collection

Fin.

Acknowledgements etc

Gerard Ackerman. Vie et l'oeuvre de Jean-Léon Gérôme. Courbevoie (2000)

Wallace Collection/John Ingamells. European Painting Catalogue (1985)

BM chess set picture © British Museum.

Belated thanks to the curatorial staff at the Wallace Collection; and once again to Peter Mason for the J-L G tips.

Seriously Seeking Eakins
Seeking Eakins While Gérôme Burns
Chess in Art Index

Blue is not the colour

The Varsity Match takes place tomorrow, or so I'm given to understand. If you're into that stuff. Personally, when it comes to Varsity Matches I always recall Danny Baker's comment on the Boat Race - that it was as if the Cup Final was the same two teams every year.

I never played in it myself, what with not being good enough and all, since back in the early Eighties there were really quite a lot of good players about. Though I did play in the Freshers' Varsity Match. I'd probably show you the game, too, were it not for

(a) my presently being several hundred kilometres away from my old scorebooks; and
(b) the fact that I got a pasting.

Chess evidently didn't count for very much in the University scheme of things, anyway, since you didn't get a Blue for playing in the Varsity Match, as you did for most other sports. Saying so inevitably raises the question "what's a Blue?" to which the answer is that I've never quite been sure, although I believe it entitled one to go to Vincent's and behave like an arse. There was also something called a half-Blue, which possibly entitled one to go to Vincent's and behave like half an arse. You got one for ballroom dancing, I seem to remember, though not for chess, something which rankled with chessplayers back in the days when there was more chess than ballroom dancing on the television.

You got nothing for playing in the Freshers' match, of course. Except a pasting.

The best of Britain (seen here with the Oxford and Cambridge teams)

Well, without meaning any offence to anybody playing, it's hard to see that the match merits a great deal of attention now that it's basically a fixture between two reasonably good club sides, such as can be seen regularly in the 4NCL (and not necessarily in the top division) or in more than one provincial league. I'd probably get in the team myself, these days, and a working definition of a match not meriting special media attention would be "any match I'm good enough to play in".

Nobody really pretends that the Varsity cricket match is any big deal any more: and to the corresponding fixture in our game, the same surely applies. Perhaps very little in British chess is a big deal any more. But the Varsity Match, nice though it no doubt is to play in, really isn't. It has some historical significance, of course. But perhaps not quite enough.

So, getting back to the Sage of Deptford, it's as if the Cup Final were the same two teams every year - and those same two teams weren't actually that good. Pfft, say I. I can see the point of elitism, sure. But what's the point of elitism where there isn't any elite?

[Photo: John Saunders]

Definitely Got Something to do with chess VII

Discovering his prodigious gift in boyhood and rising to the rank of International Grandmaster, Luzhin develops a lyrical passion for chess that renders the real world a phantom.

Or so it says here.

... to do with chess Index

It's Not You, It's Me

We need to talk.

Foreboding words, right? Words that launch you into a tunnel of worry, regret and gloom. Words that indicate a decision may be nigh and that it's not yours to make. Words that provoke more words and even more words. Words that set off a sequence of events that have to be endured, simply because there is no other option. Words that engender, more than any of the above, more than anything else, hope. Hope that this isn't what it seems. Hope that your worst fears aren't about to be realised.

 

Where are we going?

So the a and e pawns are toast. A forced sequence leads us to this very unpleasant position:

I've never felt like this about anyone before.

And yet there's hope. The d pawn is enough of a nuisance to force the white king into the centre. 

We want different things.

The pleading begins. An equilibrium is surely still possible.

I'm sorry. It's over.

In chess, we have the option to end the discussion and move on at any point. Games like this, where an unattainable carrot is dangled in your face, are doubly painful to lose because of the process involved. The possibility of saving the game means a resignation isn't forthcoming as quickly as it should be. 

Hope is exhausting.

Chess in Art Postscript: Seeking Eakins While Gérôme Burns

Last week we investigated the hidden meanings of Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) much loved painting of 1876, The Chess Players, and ended with an obscure detail on the back wall.

That murky clue is enough to give us a swinging London moment such as David Hemmings enjoyed in Blow-Up in 1966.

"What the f*** is going on?"

Take a closer look.

Hmm. A grainy image, though not from Blow-Up's unsettlingly cool and breezy day in a leafy park in South London, where a murder may have been conspiratorially committed; but an unsettlingly sun-scorched, blood-boiling, killing field in Imperial Rome where mayhem most publicly, and definitely, has been. Incendiary stuff.

Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904)
Ave Caesar, Morituri te Salutant (1859)
Yale University Art Gallery

Not convinced? Well, just as in Blow-Up we can peg them on the wall for closer inspection:

This correspondence was reported by Kathleen Foster (1997), and mentioned by Mary Morton (2010), and it leads us into the relationship between the Thomas Eakins and Jean-Léon Gérôme, and their paintings, which began with Eakins' two-year study with the French artist in Paris from late 1866 into 1868. So as to acknowledge his debt to the Parisian maître, Thomas put a reference to J-L G's "Hail Caesar" into The Chess Players of 1876.

But there is more, much more, to it than that.

Gerôme is remembered these days (if at all) for his obsessive interest in the Orient, and in particular for his penchant for the voyeuristic portrayal of déshabillé (and less) slave girls, the harem and the like. This side of the Channel, artists like J.F.Lewis and Richard Dadd offered a more English, buttoned-up, version of the same - frills sans flesh. When J-L G found time, in his detumesced moments, he put his fevered imagination aside and rendered, in authentic detail, ordinary everyday scenes of the Middle East and North Africa. And what interests us in this post is that he painted local people playing board games.

A handy example is displayed in our own backyard in London, in the wonderful Wallace Collection. You'll find it, of all places, next to the blunderbusses and scimitars in the armoury gallery, not because of the belligerence of their game, but because of their matériel.

[Image courtesy of the Wallace Collection]

Gérome painted it in 1859 and he depicts a trio of "Arnauts" immersed in a favoured pastime. Arnauts were mercenaries from Albania, here found in Egypt during J-L G's visit in 1856. According to one source these charmers were renowned for their lawlessness, haughtiness and cruelty, plus they considered everyone else to be subhuman.

Double take on the Arnauts: three seasoned campaigners intent on the game, one standing slightly off-centre; one player straight-backed, the other slouched; the three of them forming a pyramid over the board, itself laid out at near eye-level with the viewer on a piece of workaday furniture. Looks familiar?

So Eakins' hommage to his tutor was more thoroughgoing than merely including an indistinct Ave Caesar on the back wall: Gérôme's Arnauts informs the essential structure of The Chess Players of 1876. And of course several commentators have also referred to this, including Gerald Ackerman (1969), a Gérôme connoisseur, who points out that Eakins owned a photo of the Arnauts (actually of a similar version - yes, J-L G recycled his own work, something we'll come back to). So, The Chess Players is an hommage with a capital aitch.

Martin A. Berger (2000), whose "discourse analysis" we explored last week, also noted the formal similarity of the two paintings; but he invokes Gérôme's work as evidence that chess in art was a conventional code for violence, which was, in Mr B's analysis, the essence of the Oedipal undercurrent in the relationship between Thomas Eakins and his father, Benjamin.

Mr Berger also makes a point about an apparently insignificant detail: Eakins painted his chess picture on a wooden panel, rather than his usual canvas. This, he says, leads us to see the characters in Eakins' picture as if they were themselves chessmen on the "board of life". This overarching metaphor of "chess is life" is the stage represented by The Chess Players.

Upon this stage the (supposed) real life battle between father Ben and son Thomas is symbolically played out. And that, by the way, isn't represented by the chess game between Holmes and Gardel, which you can see; it's the chess game you can't; the one you will have to imagine as being played by Benjamin Eakins, who is in the picture, and Thomas Eakins, who isn't. And I don't know about you, but I'm now having a David Hemmings moment.

When it comes to a wooden board, Gérôme himself had also painted his Arnauts on one, and of almost exactly the same A3 dimensions later used by Eakins, to boot. So a more parsimonious explanation (to my way of thinking, anyway) of Thomas's selection of that kind of "support" (the term artists use for whatever it is they slap their paint on) for his hommage, was simply that he wished to submit himself to the same technical discipline as his mentor.

So, no! IMHO it wasn't the ambivalent relationship Thomas had with his father that somehow lead him to choose, unconsciously or otherwise, something as incidental, and specific, as a wooden panel on which to paint The Chess Players. The deciding factor was the rational challenge he set himself in his artistic practice.

And if you want one more bit of evidence to support my rather mean-spirited and retro-empirical outlook (yes, sooo last century's paradigm) just look at Eakins' initial sketch (below, from the Philadelphia Museum of Art) for the head of Gardel: he was clearly thinking of Gérôme's Arnaut for that hand-on-chin, wasn't he?

So, my line of conjecture runs as follows: Eakins tries out the Arnaud gesture on Gardel but discards it, because for a painting of a real "live" game of chess where he wants to indicate clearly that one side is losing, he needs a gesture more defining of defeat than doubt, of resignation than rumination. Accordingly, for his final version, he lowers Gardel's hand to steady his palpitating heart.

All in all, it is the flesh and blood Gérôme who is key to understanding the Eakins picture, not the mythical Oedipus.

Anyway, maybe it's time now to put an end to our wrestling with Mr Berger, entertaining as his book has been, though I'm really not sure if I've got the hang of this "discourse analysis" business. Let's turn to another mystery, this time concerning Gérôme alone. This post has avoided using the full title of his 1859 painting showing the armed-to-the-back-teeth assassins engaged in their recreation. They are Arnauts, of course, of that there is no doubt. But what are they playing? Is it chess? Or is it something else?

Not quite another David Hemmings moment, admittedly, but plenty to discuss: too much for one post in fact, so please come back for more next week - Gérôme wasn't built in a day.

Acknowledgements etc

Gerald Ackerman. Thomas Eakins and his Parisian Masters, Gérôme and Bonnat. Gazette des Beaux-Arts. (April 1969)

Martin A. Berger. Man Made: Thomas Eakins and the Construction of Gilded Age Manhood. University of California Press (2000).

Kathleen Foster. Thomas Eakins Rediscovered. Yale U.P (1977)

Mary Morton. Gérôme en Amérique, Exhibition catalogue. Skira & Flammarion, Paris (2010)

Thanks to Peter Mason for putting me on to the Ave Caesar connection.

Chess in Art Index
Seriously Seeking Eakins

Whatever happened to the King's Indian Attack?

Petrosian-Pachman came up the other day. The opening was not what interested me at first - it was the combination at the end which jogged my memory - but looking up the game itself, I was surprised to see it was a King's Indian Attack. It's a while since I saw one of those.

I used to see quite a few of them, albeit only when I was playing for Newcastle at the turn of the millennium and our top board (whose name, unfortunately, I don't recall) liked to roll over his opponents with the Attack, opening with 1.e4 and playing it mostly against the French and Sicilian. Korchnoi, by contrast, delayed moving the e-pawn until as late as move ten in his 1968 Candidates' quarter-final against Reshevsky. His note to his eighth move (in Viktor Korchnoi's Best Games, Korchnoi, Philidor Press, 1978, p.185 - I've translated descriptive notation into algebraic) is vintage Korchnoi:

"Why prepare" - he evidently thought - "when there is the sound defensive scheme suggested by Lasker?"

Claws in, Viktor! He does however go on to explain what's wrong, in the specific position, with the sound defensive scheme suggested by Lasker:

White has refrained from playing c4, so he can choose between various plans, and in particular, prepare the advance e4. In this case the position of the black pawn at c6 will seem not altogether logical.

Viktor renders the c6 pawn not altogether logical

Very subtle. Fischer was more straightforward: like my erstwhile teammate, he played e4 on move one. (No, really, he did.) He actually played the King's Indian Attack in his very first US Championship game in 1957 and he still thought enough of it a decade on to roll it out against - amongst others - Ivkov in 1966, and both Panno and Hubner in 1970. Though quite likely the 1967 demolition of Miagmasuren is his best, and best-known, game with the line.

Perhaps he didn't choose to play it against the greatest players on the greatest of occasions, but there's some pretty good players, and some pretty important events, in that list. But none of these games date from 1970. After that, what?

It seems such a long time since I saw a top-level player try it out: in fact, as I'm not sure I even learned the moves until after all the games above had been played, it seems almost as if it pre-dates me completely. Since I started playing competitively, I can't honestly recall seeing it played over the board, my brief Newcastle interlude excepted. Nor can I recall any genuinely top-level player giving it a go. (Karpov actually played it a couple of times, but as a junior, in the Sixties.)

Occasionally it crops up in a repertoire book - how to meet the King's Indian Attack if you play the French, or the Sicilian, or the Caro-Kann, or sometimes the Attack via 1.Nf3 (in which instance Kaufman's 2004 book recommends lines with ...Bg4, a sound defensive scheme suggested by Capablanca). But the only time I can recall seeing the King's Indian Attack recommended for White, during my time at the chessboard, was - I think - in Leonard Barden's Guardian Chess Book. And as it happens, that book was old by the time I saw it. It was written in 1967.

Ray likes it of course, and my copy of Flank Openings (the fourth edition, issued in 1988) devotes almost a third of its pages to the Attack, though here we run into problems of definition, since Ray doesn't assume that e4 is necessarily played - and indeed omitted it when nearly beating Paul Keres at Dortmund in 1973, a game curiously given as lasting 100 moves in Flank Openings (p.144) but only 98 on Chessgames.

Must have expected a rather shorter draw against Ray

Ray gives a lot more examples of the greats playing the King's Indian Attack than this short piece is able to, but it's probably fair to say that at the level of world-title contenders, there's not much on view after, say, the death of Jimi Hendrix.

Are you experienced?

So, to sum up much as I summed up the first in this series: where did it go? Was it, if not refuted, rendered positively harmless? If so, how, and by whom? Has it maybe just had a long spell out of fashion? Or have grandmasters been happily playing it for the past forty years somewhere out of my limited sight?

[Ray Keene index]