Chess Design

A real mirror of 20th century creation, Chess Design presents an exceptional documentation on chess games made by artists, designers, architects, and craftsmen: chessboards themselves, but also artist's drawings, execution plans and photographs of archives.

By presenting nearly 300 of these chessboards chronologically, the author offers a new perspective on the history of art and its evolution. Art Nouveau, Secession, Surrealism, Fluxus, Pop Art, most of the great movements that are born and follow one another in the Fine Arts find an echo with these chessboards and the 16 pieces that animate them. These chess games also reflect the evolution of techniques and materials used during this period: wood, glass, ceramics will give way, from the 1950s, to steel, plastic and composite materials.

At the border between the plastic arts and the decorative arts, these chessboards are made by big names in the art scene, design or architecture – Alexandre Rodchenko, Jean-Michel Frank, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder, or, more recently, Yoko Ono, Robert Filliou, Yayo Kusama, Victor Vasarely, Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry or Damien Hirst – as by anonymous people. The synthesis offered by the author constitutes a valuable and innovative historian's work, supported by iconography that is both rich and mostly unpublished.

Text in English and French.

Holder of a master's degree in Art History, Romain Morandi was responsible for the development of the Artstep Association (Lyon) which promotes and disseminates young contemporary artists, before turning to independent exhibition curating. Specialised in 20th century design and decorative arts, in 2012 he joined the Galerie Alexandre Guillemain in Paris as a partner, for which he signed numerous exhibition catalogues such as George Nakashima, 50 Years of Creation (2018), Alexander Calder and Aubusson (2020), or Frank Lloyd Wright’s Furniture (2022). Passionate about chess, he has been working for more than 15 years to bring together abundant and unpublished documentation on the games of artists and designers, at the origin of this book.