The Imagery of Chess Revisited. This item is unavailable.The Imagery of Chess Revisited

• An exploration of the legendary 1944-45 exhibition
• Contains works by major artists including never exhibited pieces by Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Alexander Calder

The Imagery of Chess Revisited recovers a celebrated and extraordinary moment in art history: the 1944-45 exhibition The Imagery of Chess, held at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York City. The exhibit was a legend in its own time and has been considered a singular event in the history of art exhibitions ever since. The show's organisers - the influential art dealer Julien Levy, the Surrealist painter Max Ernst, and Dada leader Marcel Duchamp, himself a serious chess player - invited a virtual 'who's who' of artists and members of the cultural avant-garde to redesign the standard chess set or otherwise explore chess imagery and its symbolism in bold new ways.

Participants included famous European expatriates and soon-to-be famous American modernists: André Breton, Duchamp, Alexander Calder, Ernst, Man Ray, Isamu Noguchi, and Yves Tanguy are among those who contributed chess sets; John Cage and Vittorio Rieti created original musical scores; and Dorothea Tanning, Arshile Gorky, David Hare, Man Ray, Matta, Robert Motherwell, and others produced pivotal chess-related paintings, sculptures and photographic works.

Larry List is a New York-based artist, model builder, and independent curator who has worked with numerous museums and contemporary artists. He is the guest-curator of the exhibition "The Imagery of Chess Revisited" (2005) for The Noguchi Museum in New York. Ingrid Schaffner is Senior Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, and is editor of "Julien Levy: Portrait of an Art Gallery" (MIT Press, 1998).

INGRID SCHAFFNER is Senior Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art at

the University of Pennsylvania.