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159 11 europe’s chessboards For some time now, Duchamp had been writing his friends to say, “My ambition is to be a professional chess player.”1 However , it was probably Breton’s 1923 article on Duchamp that electrified the avant-garde grapevine with news that Duchamp had traded in art for the game board. “Duchamp does hardly anything now but play chess,” Breton had written in Littérature. “He consents, if you will, to pass for an artist, in the sense of a man who has produced little because he could not do otherwise .” The news drifted back to New York. In fall 1924 the avant-garde newsletter Little Review reported, “Marcel has given up painting entirely and has devoted most of his time to chess.”2 The news was quite old, but the mystique lingered. Quitting art was oddly heroic. Arthur Rimbaud had famously given up poetry after a short burst of adolescent creativity. Dada preached that everyone should give up art. In reality, Duchamp was going through another of his many cycles. He started chess in his mid-thirties. At that age it was time to develop an end game for his life, whether that would be in the chess world or the art world. A life of chess was his hope. Art was his great fallback, the default world in which he had been formed. So he needed to have two end games, one for each option. When Duchamp entered the chess world, all the great moves, problems , and end games had been covered. These could be learned in books, which were a chief source for Duchamp’s self-education. “Duchamp applied absolute classic principles,” said one of his opponents. “He was very conformist.”3 The chess world also had many examples of rebels. Although a chess wizard like José Raúl Casablanca was known for his end game, he was also a source of constant surprises in his innovative moves and tactics. Duchamp, too, would try to adopt some of his own unique approaches. He never explained what those were, though he was known for—and spoke about—being an “artist” who played chess. Observers seemed to agree on one area at least: “Duchamp had a predilection for the endgame.”4 Duchamp was thirty-six at his first big Brussels tournament. After that, 160 || picasso and the chess player he joined the local team in Rouen, his hometown, and then moved up to the French national team. In 1925, he did well enough in tournament points to be earn the designation as a “Master” in the French Chess Federation . With a good national showing, he was invited to join the French Olympic team. He appeared on that international stage in 1928, and then played Olympiads in Hamburg (1930), Prague (1931), and his last in Folkestone , England (1933). In Hamburg he came full circle. He played the us champion Frank Marshall, leading to a draw, which was better than a loss. At the International Paris Tournament he beat the Belgian champion and drew his match with the top winner of the competition. For all France’s love of chess, it could not produce a winning team. Even so, Duchamp was probably one of the country’s twenty-five best players, and at various tournaments often finished near the top. He became a familiar visage in world chess circles. He had met Casablanca. Being on France’s five-player Olympic team, he also knew its captain, the Russian-born Alexander Alekhine, who took Casablanca’s world title in 1927. After 1931, Duchamp served as an officer of the French Chess Federation and as a delegate to the International Chess Federation. He was “a good deal more serious about chess than he ever was about art,” said the German-American chess master Edward Lasker (distantly related to world champion Emanuel Lasker).5 After a decade of effort, however, the top of the mountain never came into view. “Of course you want to become champion of the world, or champion of something,” Duchamp once said.6 In the world of chess, players often spoke of the beauty of a game, much as mathematicians spoke of the “beauty” of their equations. Duchamp had rejected the idea of beauty in painting, though he had endorsed what he called the “beauty of precision” and “beauty of indifference” in works such as his Large Glass. Either one of these—precision or indifference— could have made chess beautiful to him. There was no question...

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