Picasso and the Chess Player: Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and the Battle for the Soul of Modern Art

by Larry Witham

In the fateful year of 1913, events in New York and Paris launched a great public rivalry between the two most consequential artists of the twentieth century, Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp. The New York Armory Show art exhibition unveiled Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, a “sensation of sensations” that prompted Americans to declare Duchamp the leader of cubism, the voice of modern art. In Paris, however, the cubist revolution was reaching its peak around Picasso. In retrospect, these events form a crossroads in art history, a moment when two young bohemians adopted entirely opposite views of the artist, giving birth to the two opposing agendas that would shape all of modern art. Today, the museum-going public views Pablo Picasso as the greatest figure in modern art. Over his long lifetime, Picasso pioneered several new styles as the last great painter in the Western tradition. In the rarefied world of artists, critics, and collectors, however, the most influential artist of the last century was not Picasso, but Marcel chess player, prankster, and a forefather of idea-driven dada, surrealism, and pop art. Picasso and the Chess Player is the story of how Picasso and Duchamp came to define the epochal debate between modern and conceptual art―a drama that features a who’s who of twentieth-century art and culture, including Henri Matisse, Gertrude Stein, André Breton, Salvador Dalí, and Andy Warhol. In telling the story, Larry Witham weaves two great art biographies into one tumultuous century.

Genres: Art, Biography

372 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Larry Witham is an author, editor, journalist, and artist. His new novel, The Haunted Artist (2025) is the fourth in the Julian Peale Art-Crime Investigator Series. Witham is the author of nineteen books (six of them novels), and was a finalist in the 2015 Pen Literary Awards for biography. He began his writing career as a daily newspaper reporter in Washington D.C. Witham has received several national awards for his newspaper work and books, and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for a newspaper series he co-wrote. He was Project Editor for the ten-volume Templeton Press science-and-religion series. A painter by avocation, his new novel character, Julain Peale, investigates crime and intrigue in the artworld. Witham lives with his wife in the Maryland suburbs of Washington D.C.

Reviews

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have been interested in both of these artists since college, especially Ducamp. Wanting to know what they hoped to accomplish in their art. Unfortunately, I feel let down when I'm done with the book. I guess I'm hopong for something metaphysical or more ethical. Still I learned a lot about their lives.

[Anthony J Bridges · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stimulating

A tour of modern art via Picasso and Duchamps. Fascinating and challenging for anyone interested in modern art. A book full of ideas.

[Chris Hall · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was pretty good.

[Roger Lohmann · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book, and learned a great deal about modern art from it. I read it in electronic form and found myself doing Google Image searches from nearly every page. As the author notes in an afterword, it would have been prohibitively expensive to reproduce all those images in the book, but there is really no need since nearly everything discussed is readily and freely visible in full-color reproduction online.
This book would be particularly useful both to those who see modern and post-modern art as an accumulation of pretentious b.s. and those who see it strictly in cynical terms of art market manipulations. Both will find plenty of evidence for confirming their view, particularly in the expressions of that rascal, Duchamp. But if they read carefully, Witham may also convince them that this is rather profound rascality that can never quite offer the final comment on the subject. Sometimes I found myself angry, laughing and shaking my head in disbelief all at the same time.
Although long in the past now, I found Duchamp's speculations and explorations about an art of the fourth dimension to be particularly simplistic and even embarrassingly naive and pseudo-intellectual, given what follows from it. In the later chapters, however, I found myself wishing that either Duchamp or Witham or both had returned to this theme at a level other than prelude to pop art.
One place where this might surface, for example, is in the time-space coordinates of those provocative photos originating with the Hubble telescope images of starlight forming sometimes shocking, beautiful, even profound, images from points and streams of light reaching back billions of years.
On the other hand, I found Witham's discussion of