Chess in Art Postscript: Seriously Seeking Eakins

It all seems so long ago: ejh's Chess in Art series. Its final extravaganza of seven Chess in Art works was in October 2008, yes 2008, and included what is perhaps one of the most enduring of chess paintings, Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) work: The Chess Players of 1876.

[Oil on wood, 29.8 x 42.6cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York]

It has a lasting appeal because of its simplicity, its humanity, even its domesticity (that cat). You can immediately empathise with these chess gents of Philadelphia, especially if you are looking at it as a chesser. Serious chess is at the heart of the picture; the game is no sideshow to a seduction scene, an existential moment, or a metaphysical reverie. It is a celebration of chess.

But in spite of this straightforwardness, the painting offers unexpected depths. We have picked it apart a bit once already in Chess in Art Postscript: Naughty Boys, when we focussed on the formal aspects of the composition, and said something about the artist, but now there is more to be revealed, and ruminated upon. Seriously seeking Eakins : what else will we find?

Let's start with the game on the board (you need to look hard because, remarkably, the picture is just A3 size, so the chess board is only about 8cm wide). As we noted before, H. T. Dearden (2008) gave a plausible reconstruction of the position consistent with the body language of the characters, to a man exemplars of educated East Coast society in the "Gilded Age" of US post civil war stability and growth.

On the right is George W. Holmes (artist, and early mentor of Thomas Eakins) playing black. He is tense and alert as if to pounce on his luckless opponent, the slumped Bertrand Gerdal (who taught Thomas his fluent French). The standing figure, Thomas's father Benjamin Eakins, sides with Holmes, the imminent victor. Benjamin is significant. Watch out for him.

This is Mr Dearden's interpretation of the position, with black to move:

Black is clearly winning, with rather an abundance of extra material, including a bishop on e5.

But is it a B? Martin A. Berger (2000) says that, on the contrary, "Holmes's black queen stands commandingly in the center of the board...while Gardel's captured white queen rests ineffectively inside the chess table's drawer".

Well, what do you think...is that a black Q or B on e5?

Whichever it is, black to move will win. But a queen would be overkill, surely. A bishop would be more chaessthetic - and what clinches it for me is that the black piece on e5 is the same height as the white piece on e7, which we know can't be white's queen.

Actually, I can't help also thinking that in the painting white has a piece, almost hidden, on d2 - a knight probably. Another white piece would make more of a game of it, though black would still be winning with three extra pawns and the attack.

Next, let's pick over the painting's sociological allusions with Robert Torchia (1991) who we also met before, and who, by the way, also comments on black's won position but reckons "it is not possible to transcribe the exact placement of the pieces". He argues that the picture is symptomatic of the chess explosion in the States following Paul Morphy's triumph in Europe in the late 1850s.

Philadelphia, Mr Torchia says, was a hotbed of chess with no less than six clubs in the 1870s, and seven newspaper chess columns in the 1880s (87 in the country as a whole). Indeed the city hosted a "Grand International Tournament" in August 1876 - won by James Mason of Ireland, with Henry Bird third - during the city's Grand Centennial Exhibition to mark 100 years of independence. Bird met Mason again that year in another tournament in New York, and (to get a real game into this post) Bird's brilliancy is here.

It is said, btw, that Eakins exhibited The Chess Players at the Centennial Exhibition, although their official catalogue doesn't illustrate it as it does two other chess paintings: J.C.Horsley RA's Checkmate Next Move of 1862, and J.B.Irving's The End of the Game of 1872.

Back to Mr Torchia, who argues that the chess, depicted by Eakins as a cerebral and sophisticated pursuit, is a cultural correlate of the mature and self-assured New World, confident that it could beat the Old World at its own game - speaking now economically and geo-politically. Chess is a signifier for the emergence of the US as a world power to challenge that of declining Europe. So far, so chess.

There is yet another reading of the Eakins chess painting by Qe5-man Martin A. Berger in his book Man Made: Thomas Eakins and the Construction of Gilded Age Manhood. Chess, and "Constructed Manhood"? Not Übermensch Fritz obviously; so what is he talking about?

Mr Berger gives Messrs Gerdal and Holmes a good going-over first, and then turns his attention to Eakins Senior, Benjamin; or more precisely the relationship between Eakins Snr and Eakins Jnr. You can't actually see Thomas in the picture, he is implied according to Mr Berger, and it is as if the two Eakins are facing off for a game. This imagined back and forth chess struggle between them represents their ambivalent relationship in real life. And (keep up) this derives from the different models of fatherhood/manhood that were being worked out, or constructed (so that's it) in the Gilded Age, consequent in part on the way the Civil War had catapulted boys into adulthood.

Phew. You won't be surprised to find that Freud's Oedipus Complex putting in an appearance here. Not à la Reuben Fine who used a Freudian analysis of the game to make us chaps feel guilty about playing with our Kings, but in the Eakins father/son relationship.

Thus, the picture has Oedipal ambivalence between Tom and Ben written all over it. Literally, in fact, because one piece of hard evidence advanced by Mr Berger is that Thomas signed off the picture not in his own name, but oddly (in Latin, and in red) as his father's son. This is clear in the original, in full view on the drawer, if you can get close enough.

Click on to enlarge, and see "BENJAMINI. EAKINS. FILIUS. PINXIT. '76"

And what could be more Oedipal than that?

You want more evidence of his mixed-up-ness? Tom goes off to Paris against his father's wishes for serious artistic study, gets married at forty because pa told him to, lives in the same house as him all his life, and (I'll chuck this in as well) in his professional work

has to battle with Victorian prudery concerning his

use of naked models without underwear or dress.

Golly. Jesus. No wonder Tom's a mess.

The book is a fascinating piece of what, in these post-modern days, Mr B says is "discourse analysis" of culture, derived from the methodology of French philosopher Michel Foucault. It weaves an absorbing labyrinth of interpretation, into which once entered one might never escape alive, author included.

And here's an example: after positing this imagined "allegorical battle across the chess board" between the two Eakins, he concedes this would put them into a notional STBUR* situation (Gardel and Holmes having occupied the correct sides of the board), but no matter because "the only evident outcome of such an arrangement...is to reverse the starting positions of the king and queen..." Mr Berger then continues: "While the game would be "abnormal" it could progress as any standard chess game." A point that he is wise to have relegated to a footnote buried at the back of the book, lest he cop a handbagging by the militant tendency of the Campaign for Real Chess.

For sure the chessman on the Clapham omnibus might never have expected that a painting of three old-timers and a chess set (and a cat) could be the cause of such flights of fancy. Just imagine what "discourse analysis" would do with J.B.Irving.

The End of Game (1872) by J.B.Irving - photogravure of the painting

Now, to finish off this post, look at a clue in The Chess Players to yet another story - which we'll come back to next Saturday. It's an insignificant feature at the back - that painting on the wall.

What does the picture within the picture reveal? Please come back to find out.

[*Set The Board Up Rong - an acronym created by Mike Fox and Richard James.]

Acknowledgements etc

Martin A. Berger. Man Made: Thomas Eakins and the Construction of Gilded Age Manhood. University of California Press (2000). To be fair to Mr Berger, he does refer to Irving's painting; if only to say that it helped reinforce "the game's associations with real world strife". And to be even more fair, his book is a tour de force of research and analysis of all of Eakins work.

HT Dearden. "The Chess Players", Chess, September 2008.

Reuben Fine. The Psychology of the Chess Player. Dover, New York (1967).

Robert Wilson Torchia. The Chess Players by Thomas Eakins. Winterthur Portfolio 1991.

The Catalogue of the 1876 Centennial Exhibition is here Irving is plate 258 and Horsley plate 90.

Thanks to Paul Timson for his help.

Chess in Art Index

When we were Kings XXII

Tilburg, Lucerne, Paris, Munich; Everybody Talk About ... the World Chess Championship

Image appears here thanks to the efforts of the British Library and Phil Makepeace

The Times
Friday February 17, 1978
Page 5

Seven nations bid to stage world chess championship

Amsterdam, Feb 16. – Six West European countries and the Philippines have offered to stage the match for the world chess championship between Anatoly Karpov, the holder, and his challenger, Viktor Korchnoi, the International Chess Federation (Fide) announced today.

The bids to hold the contest were opened by Dr Max Euwe, president of Fide, who said the two Russians would have to make known their preferences by March 2.

The bids and offers of prize money in Swiss francs are: Graz, Austria: 1m (£270,000); Paris: 100,000 plus half the television rights; Hamburg: 1m; Il Ciocca, Italy: 150,000; Tilburg, Holland: 1,220,000 (£330,000); Baguio City, Philippines: 1,054,350; Lucerne: 100,000.

Korchnoi, stateless since he chose exile in West Europe, attended the bid-opening ceremony today, as did the Soviet Ambassador to Holland.

Dr Euwe, a Dutchman, said that although the bid from Tilburg was the highest, Karpov’s side might well object to playing in Holland because it was now Korchnoi’s home territory.

Korchnoi, dashing off from the ceremony to catch a flight to Israel for a chess tournament there, acknowledged he would like to play in Holland, but added: “It’s far too early to say.”

The match will be held in July. It will be the first world title clash since Boris Spassky lost his crown to Bobby Fischer in 1973 (sic).

Dr Euwe will announced the chosen venue and the exact date on March 16 at the latest, bearing in mind the players’ wishes, technical and climatic conditions and “the interests of Fide and the welfare of chess throughout the world”. – Reuter.

So the Candidates' Tournament is coming to London. Well, maybe. It will take more than FIDE's say so before I start booking my annual leave, but still, you never know. Malc Pein's reluctance to poke it with a ten-foot pole notwithstanding, it might actually happen.

That London is again being mentioned as a venue for such an event is a pleasant surprise. If FIDE really wants to popularise chess worldwide, holding its premier events in places other than Kazan and Elista is probably not a bad plan. Not a great move from Kirsan and his mates, then, to let Pein's bid for the World Championship match slip through their fingers.

Yes, it's possible to get a little first world*-centric about all this. Even so, while recognising that the economics of the chess world have completely changed since the fall of the Soviet Union (then: we had virtually all the money, they had virtually all the best players; now: they have virtually all the money, they have virtually all the best players) Western Europe still seems to be a rather good location for a chess tournament.

Which brings us to the article that appeared in The Times on this day in 1978. OK, Karpov-Korchnoi ended up in Baguio City in the end, but of the seven nation army of potential World Championship hosts competing to stage the greatest event in chess thirty-four years ago, no fewer than six countries came from down our way. None of this relying on a planeful of cash from Azerbaijan either. When we were Kings, Western European sponsors wanted chess and were prepared to bid big sums in their attempts to get it.

Those were the days, eh?

* A term that's long-since been out of fashion, and, if truth be told, not one that was very frequently employed back in the day. It was all third world this and third world that, the first two worlds tending to go without labelling.
Well, the third world became 'developing countries' then 'Newly Industrialised/Industrialising Countries' while the second world dropped communism and out-capitalismed its erstwhile capitalist rivals. That it succeeded in concentrating the wealth of millions into the hands of a tiny few is, I suppose, why it's able to afford to buy football clubs and fund chess tournaments.

Lizzie snap from dreary rag

Instrumental passage

Last summer I was having Spanish conversation classes round the house of a friend, Toni, who lives in my village. He's got a daughter, only aged about four or five at the moment, and he asked me whether, when the time was right, I'd teach her to play chess. Sure I would, I said.

I remembered that conversation when I was reading Jonathan Calder's piece in the Guardian last week, commending the idea of chess in schools. I've written on that subject before. I'm sceptical, at best, tending to outright hostility at any suggestion of chess becoming compulsory. It won't, of course, but there are people around (not Mr Calder, as far as I can see) who think it should be.

I know about the Armenian scheme, which doesn't particularly impress me. I suspect the educational benefits of chess in schools are largely imaginary, though making every child learn the game might well produce Armenian world champions and Olympiad winners in future years. Which is fine, from the point of view of the greater glory of Armenia, but I don't think education is properly about the greater glory of anything. Even chess.

But also - as I say, somewhere in Mr Calder's comments - assuming you have the time, and other resources, available for the teaching of chess: why chess? Is chess the best we have to offer children? If we are teach them something, something normally extra-curricular, that will encourage their capacity to concentrate and let their creativity flourish?

Why not, say, a musical instrument? From which of these are they more likely to gain pleasure and benefit throughout their lives? Which is the richer, which the deeper?

A world without the game of chess might well be greyer, but is it umimaginable, as (for most of us) the world would be without music? Yes, I know, you can do both: there are people, plenty of people, who have learned both chess and music, and even some rare individuals who have flourished at both. But for most, and for anybody trying to arrange the school day, time is limited, as are options. And I cannot see why we would prioritise chess above music. I can't even see why people who love chess would want that to happen. I certainly see no reason why society at large would want to.

That's what I said to Toni: yeah, sure I'll teach your daughter. No harm in it. But if she were to really take to something, better by far that she should take to music. It's a richer, wider, world by an immeasurable distance. It's as rich, almost, as life itself. But chess is just a board game. Arguably, the greatest one there is. But that is what it is.

My wife's family are here for the week: two kids, both of primary school age, both of whom I have, at one time of another, taught how to play chess. They both play musical instruments, one the violin, one the guitar. (Good choices, I think: perhaps better than mine. I learned the piano, and rather regret that I gave it up as a teenager - but it doesn't have those instruments' portability. But whatever.)

Me, I've spent a good part of my life in chess - that's the way it worked out, and to see that as either good or bad probably misses the point. I'm glad of it, mostly, to be honest. But the children - if they were to spend their lives in music, instead, wouldn't that, in all probability, be a wiser choice?

BORP? XIV

Last week I left you with this teaser. Appropriately enough, there was a split in opinion. So let's go through what actually happened.

34... Qa1+

I'm a big fan of prophylaxis. So why didn't I employ it here? I should be playing to my strengths, right? Well, this was approaching 3pm on a 4NCL Sunday and the trains were up the creek. I had an offer of a lift to Nuneaton from somebody who had already finished and I knew that, were I to carry on playing past 4pm, I'd lose it. Cabs are expensive, I'm a student. Bite me. The team were going to lose, so I could afford to be selfish.

But yet the engines say this is the best way to play. Mind you, they're fairly selfish too.

35. Kf2 Qb2+ 36. Kg3 Qxc3 37. Qe8+ Kh7 38. Qxf7

Again, there are two clear-cut options here. One is to nab e3 and deprive white of their passer but, in so doing, lose a6. The sequence goes 38... Qxe3 39. Qf5+ Kg8 40. Qc8+ Kh7 41. Qxa6. The other way to play is to simply stop any perpetual fruit. Something like 38... Qe5+.

Split or steal?

 Hope that the b pawn will be decisive

Keep the tension this time

Blue or Red Pill? Index

Bad book covers XXIV

The Chess Greats Of The World: Paul Morphy, Lovas, Caissa, 2006

[Bad book covers index]

Stop me if you've heard this one before

I decided that I didn't have a particularly conclusive case without a look at the relevant BCF accounts. After all, where exactly had the money come from, and who had authorised it? ....

...Thereafter I spent some time trying to get to see a copy of the BCF accounts for the relevant event, but they proved particularly hard to obtain.

[From (as I'm sure you knew)]

Dates for your Diary

February is such a smaller month than the rest, already it's time to start planning what, er, chess talks you'll be attending in March. Here are two you won't want to miss:-

1. Our very own Chess in Art Bloggers Richard Tillett & Martin Smith will be giving a talk to Hereford local history society The Woolhope Club on Saturday 3rd March at 2.15pm, in the Shirehall, Hereford. Regular readers should certainly be able to guess their subject.

2. And back in London the day before, Friday 2nd March, from 5.45 pm, The Royal Institute of Philosophy will see Professor Paul Coates give a talk called Chess, Imagination and Perceptual Understanding. Here's a copy and paste of the blurb:

Like many physical sports, chess can be highly competitive. To play chess effectively requires mastery of a number of different skills. In particular it requires a special kind of imaginative ability, one that is allied to perception. In this talk I examine the role of the imagination in the way that human chess players (as contrasted with computers) exercise their understanding of both tactics and strategy. I conclude by showing why there are important parallels between our grasp of the possibilities latent in a chess position, and our perceptual understanding of the nature of physical objects.

I think that means if you're no good at meccano, don't bother with chess. If only somebody had told me that a quarter of a century ago.

PS. Photo of meccano chess game via starman. Note white is not only on the right, but the position is a theoretical one reached either via the four knights or Ruy Lopez.

BORP? XIII

Chin - Makepeace, 4NCL 2012

White has just played 34. Qxe7 and has seven minutes to make the time control at move 40. Plenty of time, of course, but it's possible to give white a couple of tough decisions by playing something like 34...Qe6. He would then have three choices:

35. Qd8+ and 36. Qd4

35. Qa7

35. Qc5

In each case, assuming I can force the white queen to d4, Qc4 might be strong. The idea of this line is to maintain the threat of the outside passer while having a snug king.

The more obvious move is 34...Qa1+ followed by 35...Qxc3. White picks up the f7 pawn and therefore opens up perpetual potential. But black has two connected passed pawns.

It's up to you.

Maintain the defence of a6 and f7

Play 34...Qa1+ and get connected passers

Blue or Red Pill? Index

Probably Got Nothing to do with chess X

Enough with the rumours. I dare say that we'll be back with more on that sort of thing soon enough, but it's the weekend and I feel it's time for something that's ...

Koom Valley - that was where the trolls ambushed the dwarfs, or the dwarfs ambushed the trolls. It was far away. It was a long time ago. But if he doesn't solve the murder of just one dwarf, Commander Sam Vimes of Ankh-Morpork City Watch is going to see it fought again, right outside his office. With his beloved Watch crumbling around him and war-drums sounding, he must unravel every clue, outwit every assassin and brave any darkness to find the solution. And darkness is following him.

Or so it says here.

... to do with chess Index

Power to the People

Topical 'Short wins Gibraltar' interlude

Nigel Short Index

Rumours III

Rumours; Rumours II

Some questions for Ray Keene, and his replies:-

@Berlin_Endgame 18:43 Monday 31st January 2012
Ray, what's happened that made you kick this off again last night and follow up with it today?

@Times_Chess 01:18 Tuesday 1st February 2012
What do you think ? someone shd ask lara barnes herself what recently happened-that wd dispel the rumours very quickly!!

@ahmcfarlane 16:40 Tuesday 1st February 2012
THe ECF Board is dealing with this. What is your source of rumour?

@Times_Chess 16:46 Tuesday 1st February 2012
if board dealing with it then it must be true and is no longer a rumour but the truth!! ergo no source needed

There's more, much more, but I leave it to you to search it out for yourself should you be so inclined. I'll also leave you with the question of whether RDK's responses are actually answers, if you don't mind.

Meanwhile, in breaking news, the ECF speaks ...

Rumours II

Some questions for the English Chess Federation:-


Q. Is it true that Ray Keene played a significant role in securing the funds that paid for the British Championships at Sheffield last year?

- If it is, at what point did the ECF become aware of his involvement?

Q. Is it true that CJ de Mooi made no financial contribution to last year's Championships?

- If it isn't, how does the ECF explain the President's ongoing involvement with a man who says that it is?
- If it is, how does the ECF explain the President's statement on 13th July last year that,

The British Championships this year received 2 donations - one of £250 from a private benefactor and one of £16585 from me.

(my emphasis}

and where precisely is the cash that the President claims (see the ECF's own website last October) that he has put " ... into chess and into the federation ...."?

Q. However it was raised, is the ECF confident that it knows how and where the money was spent?

We've been here before. If these questions remain unanswered I fear that we, English chess I mean, will just end up going back to them again and again and again.

Rumours

[Don't allow today's bonus post let you miss PJM's You Should Date a Chess Player from yesterday.]

@Times_Chess 23:47 Monday 30th January 2012
rumours abound that LARA BARNES of t-shirtgate fame has offered a grovelling apology to cj de mooi and the english chess federation board

@Times_Chess 23:49 Monday 30th January 2012
if true perhaps lara barnes shd reconsider her now incompatible position as manager of the 2012 british championship #cjdemooi

@Berlin_Endgame 00:03 Tuesday 31st January 2012
Evening Ray. Any comment on Gidders' claim that CJ didn't put any of his own cash into Sheffield 2012?

@Berlin_Endgame 00:08 Tuesday 31st January 2012
... Or G's suggestion that you yourself helped secure the funds that actually paid for the 2011 British

@Times_Chess 00:15 Tuesday 31st January 2012
his account is accurate-however cj has undoubtedly poured much of his own funds into british chess-best president ever imho

You Should Date A Chess Player

Date a chess player. Find them in The Plough on Museum Street on a Monday evening. Find them in The Wargrave Arms, doing their best not to look at the beautiful bar staff. Find them failing, frequently. Wherever you find them, find them in deep thought, dwelling over the complexities of the Czech Benoni. Make sure they look challengingly at their opponent from time to time, for this means they know how affecting eye contact can be. Engage them in clichés and wait for them to talk about the weather. Persevere until their glance lingers and talk nonsense instead. Marvel at their imagination and breadth of vocabulary. Ignore their friends exchanging excited half-whispers by the bar. Write your number on the back of their scoresheet. Recognise that chess players are notoriously bad at making first contact. Insist on having theirs too. Wait until the weekend. Call them. Accept their mumbled apologies with good grace and an invitation to dinner.

Find shared interests and common ground like cricket and the Times crossword. Accept that chess will be more important than you. On a particularly long evening, ask them to teach you to play. Start to understand their obsession while not understanding the concepts. Let the months pass. Give up, but only after scoring 1/6 in the Golders Green Minor. Take up squash. Argue about how your playing partner Charlie is just a friend. Sleep with Charlie. Realise Charlie means nothing and you just needed a break from your partner and their bloody chess friends. At the same time, realise you like all that. Realise you love all that. Realise you love them.

Let the years pass. Marry them. Move to the suburbs where houses are big enough for a chess library. Have children. Watch them respond with indifference to being taught chess. Grow old. Wonder at your partner’s lack of achievement despite devoting 60 years of their life to the game. Watch them die, still hooked on that infuriating mixture of strategy and solitude. At their funeral, notice that, despite being unremarkable in every other way, 300 people have come to pay their respects to their rival, their inspiration, their drinking partner. Their friend.

Do these things, because a chess player understands how a subtle departure from the norm can change everything. How one mistake can ruin a life’s work. How a poor sense of timing can lead to missed opportunities. Do these things, because a chess player is forced to move on after every battle, win or lose. Because, while the little things will matter the most, they’ll still consider the bigger picture. Because not making progress can hurt more than the most crushing defeat. 

Do these things, because chess players are as human as anyone else. Possibly more so. Except the ones who don’t wash. Leave them alone.

Based unashamedly on this. Thanks to Lisa Thompson for drawing my attention to it.

The Other Talent of Bill Hook's Friend

Last Saturday's "Other Talent" post looked at the paintings and photography of Bill Hook, who played chess with the best of them in the Olympiads for the British Virgin Islands – that’s after honing his chess skills on the American chess scene, in the clubs of New York (about which, see more in the Kevin Spraggett blog) and in state and national tournaments.

One of his sparring partners was Larry Evans (1932-2010), not only a GM, but a sometime chess club proprietor and blackjack addict, and importantly for the purposes of this series of posts, a minor patron of the arts. That is to say, he bought several of Bill’s paintings (six to eight, according to Bill's memoir Hooked on Chess) in the late 1950s (or thereabouts, the memoir is sometimes a bit vague on chronology).

Bill also relates that:

“Aside from the chess paintings for his club, [Larry Evans] had bought a couple of my student paintings, one of which was a nude of an ex-Ziegfeld Follies girl, who had turned to modelling in her elderly corpulent years. Also Larry once commissioned me to paint a nude of his current girlfriend. It took me three days.”

Unfortunately the chess paintings disappeared when the club eventually folded, and presumably the nudes went West, too. But, en passant, the above passage is significant in showing that in addition to portraits and abstracts, Bill enjoyed another of the great thematic genres of Western art – the nude.

Getting back to Larry Evans: he evidently collected art in a small way and, as if by coincidence, the woman he married (he had met her across a blackjack table) was destined to become a modestly successful artist: Ingrid Evans (she took his surname) – and so we come to the subject of this post. OK, maybe not an artist who played serious chess, but the artist wife of a GM. Which is close. Worth a detour, anyway.

But first a game of chess (one I couldn't find anywhere else on the Internet; though it may be there - somewhere).

Yes, the sixteen year old Larry Evans played and beat the 61 year old Duchamp – which is a nice pendant to the Hook v Duchamp game last time. Unfortunately, I can’t find a score of a Hook v Evans game to complete the circle (but maybe a reader could help).

Larry stays cool as Marcel makes waves on the King's side, in 1953.

As for the Duchamp v Evans score: it comes from maybe an unlikely source, an artwork by Ingrid Evans. Specifically, a collage shown at an exhibition in 2009 at Francis M. Naumann’s gallery, in New York, installed to coincide with the publication of his book Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Chess (co-authoured with Bradley Bailey) which we blogged about here.

Here is the work, hung in situ in the exhibition (with startling chess sets at the front - we'll come back to those):

Its full title is Games People Play (Duchamp Evans 1948), created in 2005, and it shows Larry Evans original score of the Duchamp v Evans game (as above, except in descriptive notation). But it was an unflattering game for Duchamp (he lost, after all), and so maybe not quite an hommage.

The other major element in the photomontage is an image of Duchamp’s 1944 work Pocket Chess Set with Rubber Glove. In fact the orginal work (shown at Julien Levy's 1949 Imagery Of Chess exhibition) was lost, but was re-created in 1966 under Duchamp's supervision. I think what we see is a bleached-out photo of the reconstruction, which bore, under the ‘a’ through to ‘c’ files, Duchamp's signature – and that detail makes it clear that Ingrid Evans has, deliberately, montaged it the wrong way round, in mirror image. For some reason, back in 1944 Duchamp, also deliberately, set up his Pocket Chess Set with a nonsense arrangement of the pieces.

The other element is the QGD pawn formation, taken from the first two moves in the Duchamp Evans game, on an 8x8 grid and using modern pocket-set tokens. They appear as the drip of symbolic blood from the wrist of the defeated party (Duchamp lui-même?). This is a close up of the complete work:

The exhibition had a companion piece (below) by Ingrid Evans hanging nearby: Games People Play (Cuba 1952), which collaged the score of Pomar v Evans in the International Tournament in Havana. Having shown a Duchamp defeat in the first work, this time she shows a draw: albeit in a game that Duchamp didn’t play. The other major element in this one is a photo of another work supervised by Duchamp, of and about Duchamp: Marcel Duchamp Cast Alive of 1967, in which a disembodied head (cast from himself) contemplates a reduced chess board bearing a knight of his own 1918/9 design.

The scrap of a chess position in the upper left of the frame doesn’t occur in the Pomar Evans game itself, nor of course in the Pocket Chess Set (excepting the a7 and b6 pawns); but from what we can see of it, it does at least look like a part of some kind of sensible chess position .

By the way, before we chide the Evanses with accusations of discreet nepotism (suggested by Mrs Evans display of two of Mr E's decent, though not his most distinguished, games), remember that Marcel himself had an artwork made from the score of his own 1928 drawn game with Tartakover (so proud he was of it). Game score as a ready-made art work is a typical Duchamp trope - though this is stretching things a bit. He sold his perspex encased Chess Score (1965) to raise funds for his youth programme with American Chess Federation. Good man.

All very interesting; and Ingrid Evans invites us to get lost in a maze of hidden meanings, false echoes, crossed references and blind alleys that would have amused Duchamp himself – the joker par excellence. Well, fun for us chess players as maybe, but pity the non-chesser. Although they may have chortled at this: in front of the Duchamp Evans work are those two stunning chess sets by Sophie Matisse (yes, that's right: Henri’s great grand-daughter and grand-daughter of the second Mrs Marcel Duchamp’s first husband Pierre Matisse) as if to invite you to play a game yourself – except that the curators say........

After all that it might be a relief to get on to some of Ingrid Evans more conventional works: abstract collages from paper. Just time for one: it's called Area B :

This website shows more of her work, and says:

Much of the imagery is based on aerial views of the terrain, where natural land formations and evidence of human presence appear as organic and geometric shapes--evidence of our presence on the land.

As we noted last time, this is of that type of "abstract" art that takes the real as its raw material, and distills it. Area B starts from the down to earth - craters/crop circles, fissures/freeways, creeks/canals - and by eye and application extracts the fraction that contains the art. These days such grounded works have a broad appeal, and smooth the mood in many a corporate boardroom, hotel foyer and penthouse lounge - but they won't be seen rocking the ramparts.

Ingrid Evans thoughtful work has provided an absorbing diversion, for which, thank you Mrs E., and may the road rise up to meet you.

Footnote on the Duchamp v Evans game score

Unfortunately I'm unable to decipher the details of the event. Could anyone familiar with chess Stateside and who can make it out, please let us know via the comments box. Thanks.

And if anyone out there could help by explaining whether the Pomar/Evans round 7 game, here, had any chessic significance, that would also be much appreciated.

Acknowledgements

Hooked on Chess; A Memoir. By Bill Hook. Published in 2008 by New in Chess.

Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Chess. By Francis M. Naumann and Bradley Bailey. Published in 2009 by readymade press, on the occasion of the exhibition Marcel Duchamp: Chess Master at Francis M. Naumann Fine Art, New York, September 10 - October 30, 2009.

The excellent photographic record of the exhibition, and the Evans and Matisse works, is from mickeyono2005's photostream.

See here for some more colour-saturated chess sets.

The Other Talent of Philip Poyser

The Other Talent of Bill Hook

Chess in Art Index

Never happened before

Very strong player in their time. History of disputes with the national chess federation. Undoubted ability in the popularisation of chess. Widely distrusted by well-informed people in the chess community. Despite that, has a lot of fans, particularly on social media. Also has some iffy associates. Not everything that appears under their name is necessarily written by them. Not everything they say is necessarily to be believed. Much prefers to blog rather than write books.

I don't read a lot of Susan Polgar's blog - who did you think I was talking about? - and I'm not usually tempted to. Its claim may be "updated, timely, fair, and objective chess daily news and information from around the globe" but it might be more accurate to say that they recycle chess stories from wherever they can find them (not always with perfect literacy) and then acknowledge their sources as barely and inadequately as they can.

But chacun à son goût. At least they're not writing blog pieces every week about what they've just read on bloody Twitter.

Not that I am either, mind - I'm writing about what I read on her Twitter account in December.

Big and very exciting.

Never happened in chess or any other sport before.

Personally, my reaction to this apparent news was to try and imagine what, possibly, could have never happened in any sport before, and what it would look like if it - big and exciting as it was apparently going to be - were to happen in chess. Regrettably my imagination failed me, though in all fairness I didn't try to exercise it for very long, what with the big and exciting news coming up the following week when we would all see for ourselves.

So I settled down to wait. And wait....and wait....

....and it's now five weeks later. So did I miss it then, or what? You have to do a lot of scrolling to get through Paul And Susan's Other People's Chess News and I have scrolled through five weeks' worth of it. Is it possible that something extraordinary happened in the world of chess - and in all that scrolling, it passed me by?

You wouldn't think so. I mean at the very least, if it had, somebody else would surely have written about it. And their report would have been borrowed by ChessDailyNews.com.

Pop Quiz, Hotshot

The name of one chess grandmaster appears in the pages of John Berger's Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972), the book based on the television series of the same name. Whose?

Annotation for the Masses, Not Just for the Ruling Classes

YES.

I recently found myself in a conversation about the nature of published game analysis, particularly how it can become an outlet for the annotator’s frustration or ego. If the scribe has won, it’s easy for them to slip into the mode of the crowing jackass. If they’ve not done as well as they expected, the sob stories can flow like the BBC3 primetime schedule. You know how it goes.

Barry God - Geoff Rabbit

Obviously I’m completely winning here. Black’s king is far too exposed and his threats against my king are illusory. My opponent had been sipping noisily from his beer can for a while. He looked like one of those poor people I see from a cab window on Shepherd’s Bush Green. You know, the ones who’d be clamped for parking without a permit if they were a Ford Escort.

Unfortunately, with one move to make before the time control, he unleashed a belch that brought back memories of the time I accidentally set foot in The Rocket on Euston Road, thinking it was a gastro.

40. Rg2??

Obviously, because I’m a good player, I’d intended to play c3 first. The cretin had put me off.

40… Qxg2 0-1

I shook his hand swiftly, declined a post-mortem and headed straight for a shower.

Geoff Rabbit’s going to be pretty miffed when he reads something like that. Of course, something as blatantly character-defaming is unlikely to show its face in a serious publication. The other side of the coin is when no personality is displayed at all.

Having titled players annotate their games for a publication is a big draw and can be very lucrative. However, such games are likely to be victories. The chess pro’s ego is very fragile. One of the many impressive things about 7DCS and Zebras by Jonathan Rowson is how many games he includes where he’s lost. After all, as my primary school teachers told me, you learn more from your defeats.

I suppose it’s a question of what published annotations aim to achieve. If they aim to educate, taking a personal approach is necessary. Style is subjective. If they aim to entertain, the actual chess content takes second priority. The personality of the players is given greater exposure and the game is humanised. Both of these approaches are very readable.

The third approach is sadly very prevalent. Many annotations are soulless extensions of a player’s ego and have no ascribable value or depth. Many publications seem intent on fellating the egos and wallets of the elite, while giving little thought to the demands of the readership. Many of the best sporting pundits competed at a level below the elite, or didn’t compete at all. Jonathan Agnew, Peter Jones and Simon Barnes spring to mind. Of course, many have done, notably Martin Brundle, Matthew Syed and John McEnroe. I’m not suggesting that all very strong chess players write like automatons, but it’s undeniable that many do.

A good chess annotation should be able to identify and evaluate many concepts, including those of a more psychological nature. It should tell a story. Character, setting, plot. It should reveal the inner turmoil that comes with making a decision. Conflict. It should describe those breathtaking moments of realisation and discovery. Anagnoresis.

And then a king dies and the pieces are put in the box for another day. Catharsis.

The Other Talent of Bill Hook

You may have read this book already, published in 2008 by NiC, or one of its many enthusiastic reviews in the chess press. It’s the memoir of Bill Hook (1925-2010), chesser, gambler, photographer and artist. It's worth another look, as it gives us the subject for this episode in our occasional series on chess players with the other talent.

You can also get edited highlights in an hour long interview with Bill Hook, by John Watson, here.

Bill Hook's chess took off when he acquired a serious habit in his late teens, then frequenting New York's chess club scene to get his fix, principally at “Fisher’s” (so-called after its proprietor), which continued as the “Flea House” (self-explanatory) until its demise. In the book we meet the characters he fought there across the board, and those he befriended off it. The superb photo composition on the front cover (as all the others in the book, one of his own) captures the ethos of the joint and its Chandleresque habitués: just don’t ask them to smile for the camera.

It’s the kind of place that would lend atmosphere to a film, and indeed it did: Stanley Kubrick’s 1956 noirish “The Killing”. Kubrick himself was a notorious chess hustler in New York, apparently, and chopped plenty wood with Hook.

Even though Bill was an American citizen – almost archetypically so: making his own luck in a Wild West sort of way - he played for the British Virgin Islands. That’s because he lived there, on and off, for 42 years, on the tornado wracked paradise of Cooper Island. And in case you wondered, like me, BVI is here:

BVI (pop. 20k) improbably, and regularly, fielded a team in the Olympiads, playing in its lower reaches, and it was a proud achievement when Bill Hook won the Board One medal in 1980. He played in 17 overall, with Jon Speelman dubbing him, in 1977, “the Father of the Olympiad”.

Art, and latterly photography, intertwined with chess throughout his life. TB prevented active service in WW2 and emerging from treatment, and subsequently, he was awarded several grants enabling him to develop his creative talents.

Chess and art knotted together in one piquant moment when he played and beat fellow chess artist Marcel Duchamp in 1951, even though when asked, Marcel claimed, a little disingenously perhaps, that he was on a "long vacation" from his other talent.

Duchamp had himself also been an international Olympian: for France, before the war. Here is the game.

In the interview Bill elaborates on the development of his art:

I started in a very orthodox manner, doing a lot of realistic subjects, and I gradually introduced abstract elements…towards the end I was entirely abstract which I felt was much more creative than simply rendering a scene realistically...which I didn’t feel was creative enough.

Chess remained one his themes even as his style evolved. Here is a severely representational rendering of players and the struggle. It is based on a photograph, surely, but his artist's eye has stripped down the scene and its tonal contrasts to the essentials. Interesting enough for its three-quarter orientation, it also, as so often in chess art, calls on the hands to do the heavy lifting of the emotional load; they aren't there simply to move the pieces, so to speak. In Bill's painting they steal the scene. That's Pal Benko on the right.

And this is a sub-surrealist bit of whimsy evoking opponents in battle (note those hands again).

But that can’t really be the abstract style that Bill championed in the quote above. A better example would be this:
The scale of this reproduction doesn't do it justice, but it seems to be about the contrast of the opaque with the translucent; surface with depth; solid with fluid. If you reach out, your hand might go through it or - put better - into it. Bill was of that trend in "abstract" art that derives from reality - "abstract" as verb, rather than adjective.

He says that his experience of the world under water was his inspiration, and that his method of painting such works was...

…pouring quick-drying acrylic paints on my canvas which lay on the floor, employing a spoon and palette knife for control, (no brushes) and cultivating thin translucent washes while building up richness of colour and texture…taking months to complete a canvas.

If I understand the chronology of his story correctly, this development in Bill's work was from the 60s onwards, though in truth the expressive possibilities of pouring stuff on the floor were already well-known from Jackson Pollock in the 40s.

Bill Hook turned away from ambitions of an artistic career after early disappointments on the gallery circuit, eventually more or less completely eschewing painting for the same reason. He seemed to have found the camera a more simpatico instrument than the spoon. In the book there are 50 or so photos of the chess personalities of the latter part of the 20th Century into the 21st - from the jejune blandness of the impossibly young Carlsen to the life-etched cragginess of the indestructibly veteran Kortchnoi - and many would stand out in any photographic exhibition.

Bill's treated his subjects sympathetically, and they invariably display positive good humour, reflecting what one imagines was his own glass-half-full outlook on life. Only once or twice does he show us the dark side, as in this revealing shot of Kamsky père et fils (with apologies for the poor reproduction, here and throughout this post). It could walk off with first prize in the psychodrama category.

Bill Hook’s chess photos appeared in the chess press, and his chess achievements were honoured by a special BVI stamp. His paintings decorated several chess venues, including one started up by Larry Evans (who will appear next week), but they seem not to have survived well, are lost or disappeared into private hands who knows where. I could not find any, apart from those already in the book, on the Internet. Which is a shame, as he was a rare example of a modern chess competitor on the international stage (one or two others we'll come back to), albeit by accident of domicile, who was also a first rate artist.

The reproductions in his memoir are testament to his enormous talent – it would be good to see more of his paintings. Can anyone out there help?

Acknowledgements:

Hooked on Chess; A Memoir. By Bill Hook. Published in 2008 by New in Chess. Worth a read! All photos and paintings used in this post are by Bill Hook (except his own portrait which appears unattributed on the web).

Please see this Chess in Art post, and its comments, for more on hands.

Chess in Art Index

There's a new kid in town

How time flies. That's not the freshest of observations, I grant you. Still, it hardly seems a moment since T.C. suggested starting a blog and yet we've already whizzed through five years and well over a thousand posts.

As fun as it's been we grow weary, or old if you prefer. Two marriages, the birth of a child and new jobs have all taken their toll on our combat effectiveness. We need new blood and happily we've found some sloshing around in the body that belongs to Phil Makepeace.

The first I heard of Phil was when Release the Kraken started around a year and a half ago. Intelligent, interesting and amusing - what's not to love about a blog which uses its first post to invite readers to send in limericks about Stewart Reuben's beard? - RTK is everything that chess writing should be. Well, it is when it manages to haul its arse out of bed and get itself published.

Quality and not quantity is the Kraken watchword. I'm very pleased that Phil has agreed to fill some of the gaps by writing regularly for the S&BC Blog too. His first post is coming up this Monday. Do drop by and say hello.