Chess as Art: From 7th-Century Samarkand to Zaha Hadid
Chess Atlas
A visual timeline of chess set design spanning more than a millennium, organized by material: ivory and bone, wood, ceramic, metal, crystal, and conceptual works. It traces the evolution from the abstract Afrasiab pieces and the Lewis Chessmen through Nathaniel Cook's 1849 Staunton standard to modernist and artist-designed sets by Man Ray, Josef Hartwig, Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí, Yoko Ono, Damien Hirst, and Zaha Hadid.
Chess as art object. Duchamp quit art for chess. Dalí cast surreal fingers. Yoko Ono made both sides white.
- qsort
It's endlessly fascinating how culture, religion and even language influence stylistic choices, even though Chess is a purely abstract game.
The obvious ones: in Western sets the king has a cross on top, and Islamic traditions only use abstract shapes. But I wonder if the "usual" designs aren't at least somewhat influenced by the English language specifically. Bishops have a stylized miter and Rooks are a tower with crenellations, but e.g. in Russian Bishop is "elephant" and Rook is "boat". Even in many other Western European languages "Bishop" as in the piece is not the same as bishop as in the religious office, e.g. "fou" in French, "alfil" in Spanish, "Laufer" in German.
- schoen
I would very strongly recommend the Gökyay Chess Museum in Ankara, Turkey, if anyone is ever there.
https://www.gokyaysatrancvakfi.org.tr/en/chess-museum/
Somewhat unexpectedly, I thought it was one of the best museums I've ever visited in my life. It's the world's largest collection of chess sets, and is basically a museum of the chess set as an artistic genre, not of chess as a game. As you can see a bit from this site too, the artistic genre is quite broad and deep.
In the Gökyay Museum there were lots of questions raised by this genre:
* What historical events do people feel comfortable treating as distant history, versus something that you have to show respect or deference about?
* How would you make a chess set for blind players?
* Do chessboards have to be physically flat, not just topologically two-dimensional? Do they have to be horizontal rather than vertical?
* What events or activities can be metaphorically represented as a "battle"?
* How would different sculpture and painting traditions from around the world translate into a highly stylized chess set? How about different availability of materials?
* How do commercial marketing and pop culture leak into the comparatively culturally elite or refined realm of chess?
Anyway, it's just awesome and you should definitely go if you can.
- djmips
Which lead me to
https://chessantiques.com/product/east-india-john-company-ch...
I just like elephants so this is fantastic.