Marcel Duchamp - Chess Quotes

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I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art –and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position.

Marcel Duchamp
I have been wanting to write to you for some time, but never have time, so absorbed I am in playing chess. I play night and day and nothing in the whole world interests me more than finding the right move... Nothing transcendental going on here – strikes [in Buenos Aires, where chess competitions were organized that year for not professionals] a lot of strikes, the people are on the move. Painting interests me less and less.

Marcel Duchamp
All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess.

Marcel Duchamp
While all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.

Marcel Duchamp
The Chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chessboard, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem

Marcel Duchamp
.. Yes, indeed, what have we been up to? I feel rather like I've retired to the country, in some remote province, for that's what my life is like in N. Y. I see few people and people don't try to see me anymore as they know they bore me. I write to the Arensberg's once a year and they do the same. There is a general weariness which, I think, is not confined to our generation. To tell the truth, most people prefer war to peace... Well, there you are, my dear Yvonne. Nothing as usual. Chess as much as possible: at least chess players don't talk -

Marcel Duchamp