.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Duchamp learned to play chess from his brothers Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and became an accomplished amateur. By 1930 "the energy and ambition he had once poured into art now belonged exclusively to chess" (C. Tompkins, Duchamp: A Biography, New York, 1996, p. 289). Duchamp participated in championship tournaments, and in 1932 he co-authored Opposites and Sister Squares are Reconciled, an important contribution to the subject of the endgame. "Why isn't my chess playing an art activity?" Duchamp asked Truman Capote. "A chess game is very plastic. You construct it. It's mechanical sculpture and with chess one creates beautiful problems and that beauty is made with the head and hands" (quoted in A. Schwarz, 2000 op. cit., p. 72).
Marcel Duchamp moulé vif (Marcel Duchamp Cast Alive) was created in collaboration with Alfred Wolkenberg of Editions les Maîtres, New York, who prepared life casts of Duchamp's face and arm. The knight was cast from a favorite piece which Duchamp designed and had a craftsman carve for him while he was living in Buenos Aires in 1918. Duchamp included this sculpture in several exhibitions; "he must have liked how the work captured him engaged in his favorite pastime" (F.M. Naumann, op. cit., p. 273).
Marcel Duchamp moulé vif (Marcel Duchamp Cast Alive) was created in collaboration with Alfred Wolkenberg of Editions les Maîtres, New York, who prepared life casts of Duchamp's face and arm. The knight was cast from a favorite piece which Duchamp designed and had a craftsman carve for him while he was living in Buenos Aires in 1918. Duchamp included this sculpture in several exhibitions; "he must have liked how the work captured him engaged in his favorite pastime" (F.M. Naumann, op. cit., p. 273).