The Chess Waste Land

There are so many angles to today's featured photo that I hardly know where to start.

A game of chess © Flickr user Luke McKernan under Creative Commons.

The description said,

Barbara Kruger chess set, with paintings by Paula Rego, Peter Blake and Edward Hopper. The Waste Land exhibition, Turner Contemporary, Margate.

Margate: Ernst Gruenfeld won at Margate 1923 ahead of Alekhine (and others), although the tournament is not mentioned on BritBase: 1920-29 (saund.co.uk). For the next decade, BritBase: 1930-39, the site gives as Margate winners: 1935 Reshevsky, 1936 Capablanca, 1937 Fine/Keres, 1938 Alekhine, 1939 Keres. I presume the annual series ended because of WWII (1939-1945).

Waste Land exhibition: Journeys with ‘The Waste Land’ (turnercontemporary.org):-

In 1921, T.S. Eliot spent a few weeks in Margate at a crucial moment in his career. He arrived in a fragile state, physically and mentally, and worked on The Waste Land sitting in the Nayland Rock shelter on Margate Sands. The poem was published the following year, and proved to be a pivotal and influential modernist work, reflecting on the fractured world in the aftermath of the First World War as well as Eliot’s own personal crisis.

For more about the poem, see Wikipedia's The Waste Land; its second part is titled 'A Game of Chess'. T.S. Eliot received a passing reference in a previous Flickr Friday post on this blog: Multi-dimensional Chess Imagery (November 2017; 'The large frame under the horseshoe is an an excerpt from T.S.Eliot's poem "East Coker" (1940), that starts "You say I am repeating / Something I have said before".')

Barbara Kruger chess set: The Margate photo is taken at an angle that captures both the chess set and an artwork featuring chess behind the set. It's not immediately obvious, because the chess set is shown from the wrong side, but the board is a photo of a boy screaming. A better view of the boy's head is at The Art Of Chess 2006 (tatintsian.com; 1/10, all sets). The chess artwork by Peter Blake shows Marcel Duchamp. Another work featuring Blake recreates the famous photo of Duchamp and model Eve Babitz.

Flickr: This current post is the follow-up to The Last Flickr Friday, where I said, 'I'll be cutting the series back to one post a month and moving it to Sunday.' It might also be the last Flickr photo: SmugMug acquires Flickr (techcrunch.com; April 2018); the article overviews the history of Flickr, 'founded in 2004 and sold to Yahoo a year later'. I hope the situation after the acquisition will continue to provide inspiration for future posts featuring chess photos.