Chess with Marcel

Marcel Duchamp and Eve Babitz, 1963. Duchamp's artwork in the background.

"I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists."

--Marcel Duchamp

As I currently wade through The Guermantes Way, the third volume of Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, my mind deviates and meanders -- knowingly -- to rest on the opus and hidden world of another Gallic Marcel, perhaps not too distant in age and genre from the eccentric writer of social pastiche and illuminated prose. I am, of course, referring to Marcel Duchamp, the original avant-gardeist, art-world aristocrat and reigning aesthete/provocateur of the first half of the 20th-century.

Photographs of Duchamp playing chess, such as the one above, further clarify the parallel between the artist's oeuvre and the strategic game he so adored. Each is predicated by the moment -- a discourse that begins, in the case of the art, after confrontation with the work in its museum setting, and in the case of the game, when two players sit down at the chess board. Wordplay and eroticism ensue.

An opening exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art focuses on the last great work of the artist, perhaps his quiet pièce de résistance -- Étant donnés, an installation piece started in 1946 and installed at the PMA in 1969. The exhibition celebrates the 40th anniversary of the work's installation in the museum, in addition to paying tribute to the memory of the PMA's well-loved Director and CEO, Anne D'Harnoncourt, a leading Duchamp scholar and overseer of the original museum installation of Étant donnés.

The work consists of a wooden door, through which various peepholes have been punched. The viewer/voyeur must look through these peepholes, which open up to a lurid photograph of a nude female body posed on a natural setting. Duchamp originally installed the work in a secret space adjacent to the bathroom of his fifth-floor Manhattan walk-up apartment, which he also operated as his studio.

ceci n' est pas une porte: Duchamp's Étant donnés

Personally, I find that confrontation with Duchamp's legacy is always a pleasure. His combination of wit, intellect,and humor, much in the same vein as Proust's writing, instills a sense of curiosity, and wondering, to my life. I'd like to stage an imaginary liaison between the two Marcels, whose smirking visages illuminate an ongoing, immensely-gratifying dinner party alongside other art-world deities in my mind.