Word: chess
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Isabelita soon became Perón's most effective voice in exile, carrying his commands to Justicialists throughout Argentina. In 1971, when it seemed that warring factions would destroy the movement, Perón, in the words of chess-conscious Argentines, "moved his queen." Isabelita was dispatched to Buenos Aires, where she reminded her countrymen that "Perón is the only Peronist presidential candidate...
...ridiculed - and still plays on, as much for the audience as for himself. (After all, who ends up paying for those $70,000-a-minute commercials - and those $100,000 bonuses?) In the process, the viewer receives a game of infinite hue and complexity, an amalgam of ballet, combat, chess and mugging. No matter how fine his TV reception, no beer-and-armchair quarterback can hope to see the true game. For all the paraphernalia, the tube rarely shows an overview; pass patterns and geometric variations are lost in a kaleidoscope of closeups and crunches...
What happened in those intervening years? Neglect? Young artists constantly acknowledged their debt to the aging experimentalist. A new career? The master had no other interests save a lifelong fascination with the game of chess. No, it is simply that Marcel Duchamp was secretly working on an indecipherable masterpiece: Marcel Duchamp. That is the only important work missing from the Philadelphia Museum's exhaustive reclamation project, "Marcel Duchamp: A Retrospective Exhibition...
...beginning, Marcel, the son of an haul bourgeois notary in Rouen, was recognized as a prodigy. At 17 he joined his brothers in Paris to study art; in a 1904 work his technique already reveals a mature painter under the heavy, almost suffocating influence of the past. Even The Chess Players (1911) bears the shadow of Cezanne in its formal palette and in the calculated arrangement of figures. The rebel remains disguised in traditional tones−or in the Fauvists' coat of many colors−until The Sonata. Here, he gently anatomizes his family into the planes and facets...
...this cannot mask a crucial absence in all but a few of Duchamp's early paintings. The man who consecrated the second half of his life to chess has about his work the air of supremely intelligent, bloodless derision. There is almost no sign of human affection or concern; only the shrewd, anticipatory aspect of a mocking prophet...