Why the Artist Behind Fountain Sat Down at the Chessboard: Marcel Duchamp, French Chess Olympian

Hamburg, July 1930. At board four of the French team at the Chess Olympiad sat a man of 43.

Board one was the world champion Alexander Alekhine. The man at board four was the one who, thirteen years earlier, had signed a urinal with a false name and submitted it to an exhibition.

Marcel Duchamp. Just as his name was spreading, the man who changed the course of modern art chose chess over painting.

A Game Learned at Eleven

Duchamp was born in Normandy in 1887 and learned chess from his older brothers at eleven. In 1904 his eldest brother, the painter Jacques Villon, made an etching of the 17-year-old Marcel playing chess with their sister.

Around 1923 he set aside his major work, The Large Glass, “definitively unfinished”, and threw himself into chess. The art world took it as retirement. When he married in 1927, he reportedly spent the honeymoon absorbed in chess problems until his exasperated wife glued the pieces to the board one night. The marriage lasted a few months.

Four Olympiads

This was no hobby. He earned a master title from the French Chess Federation and played for France at four Chess Olympiads: The Hague in 1928, Hamburg in 1930, Prague in 1931 and Folkestone in 1933. In 1932 he won the Paris championship.

His results were not dazzling, but he was no pushover, drawing with the US champion Frank Marshall. He also served as France’s delegate to FIDE, the international chess federation.

In 1932 he and the chess theorist Vitaly Halberstadt published an endgame treatise, Opposition and Sister Squares Are Reconciled, in a limited edition of 1,000 copies. Duchamp designed the cover and layout himself.

[Duchamp standing between a married couple, friends of his]

The Final Move

Chess stayed in his work to the end. At his 1963 retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum he was photographed playing chess against a naked woman, and in 1968, months before his death, he staged Reunion with the composer John Cage, a performance in which moves on a wired chessboard triggered sound.

Duchamp died in October 1968 and was buried in the family grave in Rouen. His tombstone bears a line he chose himself: besides, it is always the others who die.

Marcel Duchamp and Chess

Life: 1887–1968, France
Chess Olympiads: The Hague 1928, Hamburg 1930, Prague 1931, Folkestone 1933
Results: joint first at Hyères 1928, Paris champion 1932
Book: Opposition and Sister Squares Are Reconciled (1932, with Vitaly Halberstadt)

Sources: Chess.com, FIDE Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Chess History
Photos: Unknown, Public domain / Dietmar Rabich, CC BY-SA 4.0 / George Grantham Bain Collection (Li, Public domain / LoisPettini, CC BY-SA 4.0 (Wikimedia Commons)