More than 100 sets and individual chessmen are featured in a celebrated exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. All offer insights into design and fashion from a wide spectrum of periods and cultures.
The works originate from around the world and span a period of 14 centuries. The exhibition includes a sixth- or seventh-century black stone elephant from Iraq that could be the oldest chessman in existence.There are modern sets in wood and aluminum by Man Ray, elaborate jewel-silver and porcelain sets, in contrast to a simple, abstract wooden set carved in Nigeria in the 1920s.
The exhibition also presents leaders in miniature (Augustus the Strong), historical battles (the Romans and the Teutons, the Crimean War), characters from great works of literature (Shakespeare's "Macbeth") and the fantastic (Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland").
On view are chessmen from India, Iran, Scandinavia, Egypt, Nigeria, most Western European countries, the Soviet Union, China, Japan and the United States.
The "Chess and Art" exhibit has been organized to coincide with the 1990 Congress of Chess Collectors International. The exhibition includes many examples of chess strategy, with many boards arranged to display famous openings, defenses and endgames.
In this spirit, the Metropolitan Museum will also offer a series of events and lectures on chess later in the year and will host matches between chess clubs of New York.
"Chess and Art" is drawn entirely from the museum's chess collection, the largest in the United States. It was begun in 1883 by the museum's president, Henry S. Marquand.
J.P. Morgan, a keen chess player and also museum president, bequeathed three medieval ivory chessmen in 1917.
The museum's excavations in Iran in 1936 and 1940 yielded the earliest securely datable pieces - a knight, two pawns and a rook - from the late eighth or early ninth century.
The bulk of the collection was donated by Gustavus A. Pfeiffer, writer of chess history and co-founder of the Marshall Chess Club in Manhattan. He gave the museum more than 430 sets and single pieces between 1947 and 1953 and created a fund that provided for many subsequent acquisitions.
The unique set of figures from Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" (1865) and "Through the Looking Glass" (1872) is one of the popular highlights of the exhibition.
The characters, including Alice, the Queen of Hearts, Humpty Dumpty, the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat and Tweedledee and Tweedledum, are made of white and tan-tinted pipe clay by the American ceramist Sorcha Boru (Claire Stewart, born in 1906). She has based them on Sir John Tenniel's illustrations for Carroll's books.
In the exhibition, the chess board is set up according to the illustration at the opening of "Through the Looking Glass." It represents the final part of the game in which Alice wins in 11 moves, her side cheating throughout.
The hand-carved and painted wood board is inscribed with the words of the Duchess to Alice: "And the moral of that is 'Tis love, love that makes the world go round."
Also of note is the early 20th-century set from Bornu province, Nigeria. The whittled limba wood and goatskin board were acquired from an Englishman who obtained them in Bornu in the 1920s, where two old men taught him a form of chess not played in the West since the 15th century.
It was the original game played for 700 years throughout the Arab world. The pieces remain amazingly faithful to the early Islamic style.
The "Chess and Art" exhibit will run through Jan. 6, 1991 - in case you get to New York during that period. It is being shown on the main floor, in the gallery adjacent to the Josephine Bay Paul Gallery.
The Crimean War set was made of red-stained and natural ivory in 1855, a year before the end of the war against England, France, Sardinia and Turkey.
The chessmen are portrait busts on pedestals that represent monarchs and generals at war. Among the white players are Napolean III and Queen Victoria, while the red include Emperor Alexander II of Russia and Czarina Alexandrovna. The board has nine rows of 13 squares (instead of the more standard eight rows of eight) for playing Oriental war. The object was to capture the towers, which remained stationary and represent Paris and Petersburg.
-CONGRATULATIONS TO THE SOLVERS! - Joye McMullend, Raeburn G. Kennard, Nathan R. Kennard, Dale B. Brimley, Ted Pathakis, William O. Smith, Harold Rosenberg, Brian Harrow, Joan Nay, David L. Evans, Dean Thompson, John N. Nielsen, Glannin Cloward, William D. Price, Ardean Watts, Jim Turner, Paul R. Lindeman, Hal Harmon, Gene Wagstaff, Ann Neil, Kay Lundstrom, Covert Copier and William DeVroom.