Naked Chess: How to Win

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In other words,” Walter may or may not have ended, “Duchamp playing chess with a nude in a photograph may be art.” Still no ChessBase Account? learn more > Sac, sac, mate! Solve tactical positions of your playing strength. Boost your calculation skills. Enjoy adrenalin rush with tactic fights! I’ve been to New York since to see him,” Walter went on, “and the first thing he said to me was, ‘And so we meet again.’”

Maybe it was the spectacle of Walter playing chess with Duchamp “for art” that gave Julian the idea. After all, by 1963 it had been about forty years since Marcel had retired to play chess (or so he wanted the world to think). For forty years someone could have come up with the idea of photographing the master of Nude Descending a Staircase playing chess with a naked woman. But nobody in Paris or New York thought it up. I knew it had to be him because suddenly I felt so much better— that bedside manner of his permeates a room. It’s, like, half desperado, half Lourdes. Still, this was Pasadena, the home of gracious ladies painting watercolors on afternoon outings, so I said, “You better ask people, Julian, and make sure it’s OK.” All my ideas about Pasadena—about L.A. itself—were undergoing a molecular transformation. We were going from Little League to a home run in the World Series. Even my father thought it was a great idea, driving home in the car, although my mother did say, “If you change your mind, darling, it won’t matter.” Larry Bell: Shirley and her younger sister Glo [Gloria] came in red, white, and blue outfits. They both looked very cute, especially Glo.When the pictures were made, Babitz was a 20-year-old student at Los Angeles Community College. The daughter of a violinist and an artist, and the goddaughter of Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, Babitz was already at ease in a sophisticated, aesthetic milieu. She integrated herself into L.A.’s slowly burgeoning art scene, partying with Billy Al Bengston, Ed Kienholz, Kenneth Price, and the men who’d become integral to the California Light and Space movement: Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, and Peter Alexander. Years later, she also became romantically involved with both Ed Ruscha and his brother. Babitz fully embraced her role as an art groupie. Still no ChessBase Account? learn more > 8 million games online! Updated weekly, our definitive database has all the latest games. In Hollywood, there was a genuine collector couple, Walter and Louise Arensberg, who amassed Duchamp works as though Los Angeles were a totally cultivated city where you’d expect people to know what was happening artwise in the twentieth century—like Gertrude Stein and her brother, who knew what was what practically before anything was anything. Only the Steins were in Paris, where art was in the air, whereas the Arensbergs were in Los Angeles, where if you could draw, you’d be good if you were Walt Disney. Ed Ruscha: I met Andy in 1962 in New York at his studio. He, Joe Goode, Gerard Malanga, and I went to lunch at Horn & Hardart’s nearby. Andy was not weird in any way. He liked my book Twentysix Gas Stations because there were no people in the pictures. He had a tremendous force in his personality, and you knew he was for real and would become famous without any doubt. In typically singular fashion, Marcel Duchamp was 76 years old when he had his first career retrospective. The artist chose to present it in the unlikely location of Pasadena, a quiet, upscale Los Angeles suburb. The 1963 show was a coup for the visionary young gallerist Walter Hopps, whose Ferus Gallery formed the nexus of an emerging LA art scene. The opening night party at the Hotel Green drew people like Andy Warhol, who a year earlier had exhibited his soup cans at Ferus, as well as young and eager local artists like Ed Moses, Larry Bell, Ed Ruscha and Joe Goode. Most had had work in Hopps’ previous show, New Painting of Common Objects, in 1962, commonly considered the first exhibit dedicated to pop art.

Eve Babitz: You know Sex and the City? Well, Walter was the Mr. Big of L.A. He was always pulling out the rug from under you. Billy Al Bengston: Walter was a wild guy, very interesting. You know he’d sleep in a rug like a taco? Yeah, he’d come over to your house and the next thing you know, your rug would be rolled up, and you’d say, “Oh, Chico’s here.” Mirandi Babitz: Julian, of course, had an invitation, and he asked Eve to go with him. Only she only wanted to go if Walter asked her and he didn’t. Eve Babitz: I don’t know why I didn’t want to go with Julian. I guess because it would have felt like crashing and it didn’t seem like the kind of party you could crash.

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Still, Nazi Paikidze flipped the bird at a country forcing Sharia law. Wanting her to wear a garb and cover herself. And she’s like nah I’m hot and I want everyone to see it. I knew it had to be him because suddenly I felt so much better—that bedside manner of his permeates a room. It’s, like, half desperado, half Lourdes. I never met his parents, but nobody else did either, they never set foot inside the Ferus, the Pasadena Art Museum, or anyplace else they were likely to run into him. They probably were home wondering where they went wrong, why they’d ever allowed him to go into that program for gifted children, ruing the day he set off on that field trip for the Arensbergs’, the only people in L.A. with a houseful of Duchamps. And because we were in Southern California—in Hollywood even—there was no history for us. There were no books or traditions telling us how we could turn out or what anything meant.

Well, here I was—in the gallery with no shoes on, prepared to make history, my feet growing colder in more ways than one.Walter’s kiss goodbye was filled with history. He even asked, “Do you still have that silver bullet I gave you?” I still have this because I have everything he gave me except a signed Lichtenstein (I always lose the art). I have memories of his voice, a silver bullet, convictions about how to see, and of course, Marcel. In 1957 or so, when Walter opened the Ferus Gallery with the artist Ed Kienholz, he finally dropped out of school. He had already opened three galleries by then, and he was only twenty-four. He still looked like a doctor, and he had such a bedside manner he made people feel better just by entering a room. And though he talked all the time, he gave the impression of utter silence. All my ideas about Pasadena—about LA itself—were undergoing a molecular transformation. We were going from Little League to a home run in the World Series. Even my father thought it was a great idea, driving home in the car, although my mother did say, “If you change your mind, darling, it won’t matter.”