The Chess Players

The Chess Players, Marcel Duchamp, 1911

Duchamp gave up on canvas painting quite early on in his career, unsatisfied with what he termed “retinal art". 

“The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.

When Duchamp understood that he had generously sown the wind with his youthful ideas until he had no more, he aristocratically stopped his “game” and announced prophetically that other young men would specialize in the process of contemporary art.

Then he played chess itself.”

— Salvador Dalí, from Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, by Pierre Cabanne