| This dissertation reevaluates the art and identity of Marcel Duchamp by focusing on the artist's preoccupation with chess, which took an unflagging hold on the artist shortly after his arrival in New York in 1915. Duchamp's intense study of chess and his achievements in professional chess circles have long been treated by art historians as a mere diversion from his career as an artist or as a separate field of study best left to chess experts. Conversely, I maintain the proposition that chess played an unavoidable role in his artistic career, both as a theme in his art and as a critical component of his prismatic character.; To support my thesis, I will conduct close readings of Duchamp's works that were inspired by his interest in chess, particularly those in which he incorporated chess iconography or vocabulary. The evidence revealed in his own work of his steadily increasing interest in chess is upheld by numerous images of Duchamp playing or associated with chess by his friends and colleagues in the New York avant-garde art community, who anticipated his impending and convincing “abdication” of the role of artist for that of a competitive chess player. I will perform iconographic and psychoanalytic readings of these images to confirm that they demonstrate Duchamp's gradual and irrevocable association with the game, and how this persona counterbalanced his identification as an artist. I then apply this knowledge to the defining work of Duchamp's early career, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even of 1915–1923, which Duchamp left incomplete to embark on a spree of chess tournaments in Europe. This seminal work, part of which constitutes a disguised self-portrait, is replete with evocations of chess. I contend that the self-portrait is conflated with the theme of chess in one of the work's primary elements, the Nine Malic Molds, and thus substantiate the critical importance of chess for Duchamp, his art, and his identity. |
