Surrealist Chess

Continuing with the weekly series on AI comics, after a brief detour for the year-end holidays last seen in Is 2025 a Dystopian Year? (December 2024), we return to aimless wandering around various topics. Here the previous post was World Class Asian Players (ditto).

This current post started with some recent news from November 2024: Magritte painting fetches record $121 million at auction (brusselstimes.com). Which painting was that? The article informed,

A painting by Belgian surrealist René Magritte was sold for a record-breaking $121.16 million (€114 million) at an auction in New York on Tuesday evening. The painting, titled L'empire des lumières ('The Empire of Light') dates back to 1954 and features a solitary lamp post illuminating a darkened street, juxtaposed with a bright blue day-lit sky. It is one of 18 versions painted by Magritte in different mediums (oil and gouache) and with slight variations.

Somewhere in the back of my head was a factoid that Magritte played chess and sometimes incorporated the game into his paintings. Sure enough, I found this from July 2022: Hidden Belgium: Greenwich Modern (brusselstimes.com; Derek Blyth). The lead sentence of the article informed,

The Surrealist painter René Magritte liked to visit the creaky old Brussels bar Le Greenwich in Rue des Chartreux. He would join the local men to play chess and try unsuccessfully to sell one of his paintings.

In the 1980s and 90s, I sometimes played chess in the Greenwich. I'll come back to that in a moment, but first let's see what AI comics have to say about Magritte.

'Rene Magritte plays surrealist chess.'
AI Comic Factory

The 'Greenwich Modern' article continued,

The café closed in 2009 to allow the Ghent architects Robbrecht & Daem to renovate the beautiful Art Nouveau interior dating from 1907. It relaunched two years later as an upmarket brasserie. The chess players were politely asked to leave.

I passed by the Greenwich some time after that and noticed that the chess sets were gone. Apparently they're back again, so next time I'm in the area I'll peek inside the café to see for myself.

An early post on this blog, Le Greenwich (July 2006), pointed to some pictures, but they are also long gone. Maybe they still live in the Internet archive.