14 December 2017

Chess and Art Movements

It seems like every time I do a post about chess art -- for example, Dube and Chotka (June 2017) -- the discussion touches on the topic of art movements. I thought it might be interesting to map chess art on to the different movements, but then discovered that it's already been done. In Chess Art History (Carolus Chess), more than 40 art movements are listed with an example featuring chess. Wikipedia's Art periods says,

An art period is a phase in the development of the work of an artist, groups of artists or art movement.
and lists six major periods further subdivided into dozens of movements. For example, the major period 'Modern art' encompasses 'Cubism: 1907-1914, France', along with a note:-
The countries listed are the country in which the movement or group started. Most modern art movements were international in scope

Here are examples of cubist art featuring chess, using the same collage technique last seen in Flickrless Friday; 'Call the rows 'A' to 'C' (from top to bottom) and number the images in each row '1' to '7' (from left to right).'


Google image search on 'chess cubism'

About half of the examples show chess sets (e.g. 'A1' in the upper left and 'C6' in the lower right), while the other half are paintings. The image in 'B3' could be a sculpture, but is in fact a photo of Cubism-Inspired Game Pieces : Artistic Chess Set (trendhunter.com).

With so many recognized art periods, there is plenty of source material here. I'll come back to the subject the next time I'm looking for an idea for my daily post.

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