Home

Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Chess

Follow the exhibit Marcel Duchamp: Chess Master at the Saint Louis University Museum of Art and in the New York Times
Coverage of Marcel Duchamp: Chess Master at Art Basel and in the New York Times.

"Marcel Duchamp was the playful magus of modern art, the inveterate gamester who turned old truths inside out and made us rethink what art was, or could be.  We all knew that one of the fulcrums of his thinking was the game of chess.  Now, for the first time, we have a book that shows just how deeply chess shaped and defined Duchamp's own thinking, as well as his art.  Lively, surprising and very readable, this is a brilliant example of art scholarship at its highest and most original (i.e. Duchampian) level."

- Calvin Tomkins
Staff writer for The New Yorker and
author of Duchamp: A Biography 

Francis M. Naumann

 One of the foremost experts on Duchamp and Dada; a selection of his books includes (with Hector Obalk) Affectionately Marcel: The Selected Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp; (with Rudolph Kuenzli) Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century; Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction; New York Dada, 1915-23. In 1996, he organized "Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York" for the Whitney Museum of American Art, in 1997, "Beatrice Wood: A Centennial Tribute" for the American Craft Museum in New York, and, in 2003, he co-curated "Conversion to Modernism: The Early Work of Man Ray" for the Montclair Art Museum.

Bradley Bailey 

Assistant professor of art history at Saint Louis University. His doctoral dissertation, "Duchamp’s Chess Identity," was completed at Case Western Reserve University in 2004, and he has published articles on Marcel Duchamp’s complex system of identities in SOURCE: Notes in the History of Art and Tout- Fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal. In conjunction with the publication of Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Chess and the 2009 U.S. Chess Championship, he organized the exhibition “Marcel Duchamp: Chess Master” at the Saint Louis University Museum of Art. His forthcoming research explores the reproduction and reception of Duchamp’s readymades in 1964.

Jennifer Shahade

Two-time American Women’s Chess Champion (2002, 2004), and author of Chess Bitch: Women in the Ultimate Intellectual Sport (2005). She is the editor of uschess.org, the official website of the U.S. Chess Federation. Her current projects include hulachess, a video based on one of the games in this book. She participates in two non-profits, 9queens, where she is a founding board member, and the Saint Louis Chess Club and Scholastic Center. Jennifer will be a live color commentator for the 2009 U.S. Championships from May 7 - 17, 2009. To see her latest video, “Naked Chess”, click to this link: http://vimeo.com/4165866. Find out more about Jennifer at jennifershahade.com.

Larry List

New York-based independent curator and model builder who curated The Imagery of Chess Revisited for the Noguchi Museum, which traveled to the Menil Collection in Houston. List's most recent project was curating the exhibition 32 Pieces: The Art of Chess at the Reykjavik Art Museum, on view until April 13, 2009, which has an accompanying catalogue. List also wrote an essay on art and chess for the catalogue of the 2008 exhibition Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia at the Tate Modern.