Matisse, Duchamp and chess

 

There’s an interesting contrast in the ways Matisse and Duchamp regarded chess.
Duchamp was obsessed with the game and almost seemed to prefer it to art, playing it throughout his life and giving much of his time to its study and practice. Matisse was not interested in board games and never played them.

Matisse
“ A walk with Matisse is a real botany lesson. He knows all sorts of things about the growth of fruit, the nature of the soil, which have nothing to do with painting. To say that he is interested in such diverse subjects reminds me that he plays no games. Matisse, at 74 years of age, has never touched a a game of cards or chess or draughts .When, after too sustained an effort or during a convalescence, someone suggested that he played something for amusement, he refused, saying like Degas, ‘And what if it bores me to distract myself?’”
 Marguette Bouvier in conversation with Matisse 1944
   
“One must study an object a long time to know what its sign is. Yet in a composition the object becomes a new sign which helps to maintain the force of the whole. In a word, each work of art is a collection of signs invented during the picture’s execution to suit the needs of their position. Taken out of the composition for which they were created, these signs have no further use.
This is why I have never tried to play chess although it was suggested to me by friends who thought they knew me well. I told them ‘I can’t play with signs that never change. This Bishop, this King, this Queen, this Castle, mean nothing to me. But if you were to put little figures which look like so-and-so or such a one, people whose life we know, then I could play; but still inventing a meaning for each Pawn in the course of each game’
Matisse ‘Testimonial’ 1951


Duchamp
“For Duchamp however, chess was much more than a retreat or refuge, it was a near expression of the Cartesian side of his nature; which like every Frenchman of his class and education he had acquired as a matter of course. Although he never read Descartes to speak of, Duchamp admitted to being ‘very much a Cartesian’”
Calvin Tomkins - Duchamp: A Biography 1998

“Chess is a marvelous piece of Cartesianism, and so imaginative that it doesn't even look Cartesian at first. The beautiful combinations that chess players invent - you don't see them coming, but afterward there is no mystery - it's a pure logical conclusion”

“I feel I am quite ready to become a chess maniac. Everything around me takes the shape of the Knight or Queen and the exterior world has no other interest for me other than its transformation to winning and losing positions” 1919

“I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art - and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position”

“There is a mental end implied when you look at the formation of the pieces on the board. The transformation of the visual aspect to the gray matter is what always happens in chess and what should happen in art.”

“While all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.”




Much has been written on Duchamp’s lifelong relationship with chess. Perhaps the certainties that rules bring to a game’s environment was a solace from his early experiences of the Paris art world, but he also saw an aspiration for art in the game’s non-physical, intellectual aesthetic, including perhaps, unconsciously, the role of strategy.

Matisse did not recognise chess as a metaphor for being in the world and preferred the mutability of life to games such as chess, in which the rules are fixed. He felt he could only relate to chess if the elements became new each time they were experienced and confluent with the flow of nature, like Heraclitus’s river, which cannot be stepped into twice. For Matisse, it was the act of painting that was both being alive and a metaphor for the same.