Over the course of the twentieth century, two men came to define and shape modern art as we know it. On opposite ends of the spectrum, Pablo Picasso emphasized skill (pro-art) and Marcel Duchamp, a famous French provocateur in art and a chess player by avocation, emphasized jokes and ideas in art (anti-art). 

Journalist, artist, and author of the forthcoming Art Schooled Larry Witham will trace the paths of these artists, follow their quirky lives and brilliant ideas, and finally come to discover how their opposing views of art play out in the world today. From the streets of Bohemian Paris to New York City, from Picasso's classical works to Duchamp's "readymades," PICASSO AND THE CHESS PLAYER tells the parallel stories of the men who have come to symbolize the question: "What is art?" 

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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 Duchamp: 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.

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kontakt:

Piotr Wawrzeńczyk

piotr@literatura.com.pl