BARCELONA.- Endgame: Duchamp, Chess and the Avant-Garde is an account of the twentieth-century avant-garde movements up to the beginning of conceptual art, told from an unusual vantage point: chess.

The avant-garde in check
After the opening and the middlegame, when there are only a few pieces left standing, a chess match enters its decisive stage: the endgame. Much has been theorised about this crucial moment. Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), a passionate chess player as well as a leading avant-garde artist who actively contributed to the conceptual turn that gave rise to contemporary art, wrote a manual on endgames with the chess player Vitaly Halberstadt in 1932. The book, entitled L ’opposition et les cases conjuguées sont réconciliées, proposed a system that transcended the antithesis between traditional closing methods and the new theories that were emerging at the time.

Endgame: Duchamp, Chess and the Avant-Garde shows how this quest for synthesis is also reflected in Duchamp’s artistic project as a whole and, by extension, in the strategies used by the avant-garde to challenge tradition in its march towards conceptual art.

Marcel Duchamp and the knight’s move
Chess, which had historically been an intellectual pastime of the upper classes, reached its peak in the early twentieth century and spread through all social strata, becoming the most respected game in both the public sphere and domestic circles. This was the cultural context for the formative years of Marcel Duchamp, a leading avant-garde artist who was actively involved in the shift from figurative art to the critique of representation that led to the new forms of artistic practice of the late sixties.

Duchamp’s enthusiasm for chess was so great that in 1923 he announced that he would abandon art ‘to play chess’, an intellectual exercise that he considered ‘much purer’ than art in its social position. Chess was an artistic activity through which Duchamp could maintain an oppositional logic – represented by the black and white of the pieces – while at the same time the chessboard and its rules allowed him to reach a conciliation that made the confrontation in the endgame meaningless. According to Segade, the history of the avant-garde and the attack on the paradigm that it represented can be reconstructed between the two extremes of the game – synthesis and antithesis.

Taking Duchamp’s life as its timeframe, Endgame: Duchamp, Chess and the AvantGarde explores the hypothesis that chess was a constant backdrop to the historical avant-garde in several senses: ‘as an intellectual leisure activity in the private and public spheres, as a social metaphor, as a remnant of the conventional point of view, as a means to reflect on language, as a theatre with the capacity to express the dramaturgy of consciousness, as a war game, and as a gameboard on which to challenge rules and conventions,’ Segade explains.

The narrative of the exhibition is illustrated by some eighty works including paintings and sculptures – some of which have never been shown before in Spain – by some of the key artists of the twentieth century, drawn from major public and private collections in Europe, America, and Middle East. The selection covers a long period spanning from 1910 to 1972 and also includes four of Duchamp’s readymades and a dozen historical chess sets, some designed by leading artists from the avant-garde and pioneers of conceptual art. Endgame: Duchamp, Chess and the Avant-Gardes is complemented by a wide range of original documents including books, posters, photographs, films, and audio recordings from public and private archives around the world that illustrate and contextualise the role of chess in the move from the early avant-garde to the first manifestations of conceptual art.

A game in six moves
The exhibition is structured around six sections. The first, entitled From Family Leisure to the Painting as Idea, begins with chess as a motif in the domestic postimpressionist genre and ends with Duchamp’s invention of readymades, by way of the geometric explorations of the Cubists and their use of the chessboard as a regulating element in the composition of paintings. This room includes works by Jean Metzinger and Jean Crotti as well as Duchamp himself. Highlights include Duchamp’s The Chess Game, on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the readymade Trébuchet, from The Israel Museum Collections, the title of which is a play on words based on a classic chess move.

The second section, entitled Chess and Art for the People, looks at how chess became an element of education and leisure in the utopian development of Russian constructivism. At the same time, the game took on a renewed, abstract form in the teachings of the Bauhaus, as part of a programme to redesign everyday objects. This room contains three outstanding works: Paul Klee’s 1937 Überschach, an oil on canvas on loan from the Kunsthaus Zürich, Sonia Delaunay’s Simultaneous Dresses (Three Women, Forms, Colours), from the Museo ThyssenBornemisza in Madrid, and Wassily Kandinsky’s 1923 Unbroken Line, from the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf.

The third section, The Psychoanalytic Space of the Chessboard, shows how, in the hands of the surrealists, chess became a method of psychoanalysis: ‘a stage for gender battles and a space for subverting the laws of the chessboard-world itself,’ as Segade puts it. This room includes pieces by Man Ray and Muriel Streeter as well as two 1950s works on paper by Catalan writer Mercè Rodoreda in her role as painter. The section ends with a projection of René Clair’s legendary film Entr’acte, in which Duchamp and Man Ray play a disrupted chess game.

Then visitors will find two notable works that show the bond of friendship that united Marcel Duchamp and Joan Miró: a readymade consisting of a signed tie that Duchamp gave Miró in New York in 1947 for his birthday, and the Boite-envalise, one of Duchamp’s masterpieces, which his widow donated to the Homenatge a Joan Miró collection, the Fundació Joan Miró’s modern art collection created as a tribute to the artist.

During the hostilities that shook Europe in the thirties and forties, chess became a key element of national propaganda and a metaphor of triumph in battle. In the fourth section, entitled The Game of War, the exhibition explores how chess became an extraordinarily sophisticated vehicle for the work of social psychology during wartime. It also explores how migration resulting from the war favoured the spread of chess culture among the international avant-garde. Paris-based Portuguese artist Maria Helena Ciera da Silva, who had fled to Brazil at this time, produced the painting The Chess Game (1943), which is displayed in this room courtesy of the collections of the Centre Pompidou.

In the forties, the imaginary of chess became a recurring subject for the most important artists of the time, so much so that they began to design their own sets, thus blurring the boundaries between chess and the work of art. Many of these sets were exhibited in an exhibition organised by Julien Levy, Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp in New York in 1944. The penultimate section of the exhibition – The Imagery of Chess – is a homage to the historic exhibition from which it borrows its name, and includes some of the most impressive chess sets from the 1944 show: avant-garde chessboards and pieces by Max Ernst, Alexander Calder, and Isamu Noguchi, among others.

One of the foundations of early conceptual art was chess: not long before his death, Duchamp passed on the baton of his work with a last public appearance in a chess performance with John Cage in 1968. Thus began a new stage in history, a new wave that included Pop Art and Fluxus, against the backdrop of the Cold War. The final section of the exhibition, Endgame: Chess in the Origins of Conceptual Art, includes the recording of that historic performance, as well as a selection of chess-inspired works produced by pioneers of conceptual art such as Takako Saito, George Maciunas, and Yoko Ono. It also includes two outstanding readymades dating from the sixties, notably Hommage à Caissa (1965), both from The Israel Museum Collections.

The exhibition project is rounded off with a programme of related activities and an accompanying publication featuring a curatorial text in which Manuel Segade discusses the six sections of the exhibition, an essay by Adina Kamien-Kazhdan, Curator of Modern Art at The Israel Museum, on Échiquier surrealiste, the legendary photography collage by Man Ray included in the third section of the exhibition, and an article by the writer and professor of Contemporary Art Estrella de Diego, which explores the fascination that chess aroused in leading avantgarde artists and intellectuals.

The exhibition will remain on show at the Fundació Joan Miró until 22 January 2017.

As Manuel Segade explains, Endgame: Duchamp, Chess, and the Avant-Garde aims to tell ‘the story of the avant-gardes through “a game called language”, arranging the modern project on a gameboard so as to offer a new vantage point from which to understand the step from the first avant-gardes to the earliest manifestations of conceptual art.’ Visitors are invited to enter the game and discover the history of modernity from a new, playful angle, as a piece on the chessboard of art.