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By American Master
Chess Life Editor 1984 - 1988
Author
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Is Chess an Art? |
In one of the
half-dozen or so truthful entries in the 31-volume Great Soviet
Encyclopedia, chess is defined as “an art in the form of a
game.” Which amounts,
rather less than more, to Savielly Tartakower’s epigram, “Chess is
the art of battle for the victorious battle of art.”
Which amounts, rather more than less, to Larry Evans’
description of the grandmaster’s art as trying to paint the Mona
Lisa while the opponent grabs at the brush.
If art is considered strictly in the dictionary sense of
creating things that display form, beauty and unusual perception, then
chess is certainly an art.
If one considers the skill and
craftsmanship often associated with art, then chess has a further
claim. Lenin called chess the “gymnasium of the mind,” and
Goethe crowned it “the touchstone of the intellect.”
Bonar Law, a chess-playing British prime minister of the early
1920s, called it “a cold bath for the mind.”
Gymnasiums, touchstones, cold baths and the intellect – we
have here the suggestion of rigor and vigor, which sits well with what
we know about the focussed habits of, say, Alexander Alekhine, Bobby
Fischer and Garry Kasparov and about the disciplined labors of a da
Vinci, a Dickens and a Rembrandt.
There is also, as in the eponymous work by
Fred Reinfeld, the human side of chess.
“Chess, like love, like music,” wrote Siegbert Tarrasch,
“has the power to make men happy.”
Men react aesthetically to chess games finely played.
Writers bestow words such as “elegant” and “brilliant”
on moves and games, and what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has called the
ancient trinity of “the good, the true and the beautiful” is much
in evidence in chess writing. Especially in books written by Spanish speakers, where a riot
of exclamation points and superlative adjectives manifest the
excitement of aesthetic involvement.
Clearly, then, chess is an art.
Or, perhaps, not so clearly.
Chess lacks two qualities that are often associated with art.
Our game is finite, a closed system, though its finitude may
seem infinite. Painting,
music, poetry and prosing are open-ended endeavors that are bounded by
no ultimate limits. Too,
the great arts of the ages can be immediately appreciated and
essentially comprehended without requiring what is, for the
uninitiated, arcane knowledge. In
chess, you must know the rules. In
the great arts, knowledge of norms may deepen understanding but are
not essential. No specialized knowledge stands between the observer and
Velasquez’s Las Meninas as it does between a spectator
ignorant of chess rules and Fischer’s Mozartian elegance in game six
of the first match with Boris Spassky.
Rules-based necessity in chess means that
there is no final freedom of infinite variety.
The fact of finitude is not the fact of the classic arts. Chess shrinks somewhat.
Or even shrivels. Felix
Mendelssohn expressed disquiet, “Chess is too earnest for a game;
too much of a game to be earnest about.”
Raymond Chandler spewed contempt, calling chess the greatest
waste of intellectual energy, short of the Stalinist apologetics of
the 1940s.
The
most obvious objection to the chess-as-art idea is that an idio-savant
computer chip can routinely produce brilliancies against humans.
Chess seems to become a technical function rather than a
creative pursuit. But computers can now produce paintings and music, and there
are stories about chimpanzees and babies creating award-winning
paintings. The issue is
not whether idiot-savants – mechanical or animal – can produce a
praiseworthy effort in the arts; the issue is whether human
personality can express itself through a given activity.
If so, then that activity has some claim to being called an
art. Not a major art and
not always an art – but an art at some level and at some moment.
I think that human personality
definitely expresses itself through the movement of the pieces, and
this expression can be seen in different styles of play and
problem-composing. True, any single game by a top master might have been played
by another top master. Anatoly
Karpov, for example, is famous for his patient probing, but his
brilliant endgame play against Andrei Sokolov in game 10 of their 1987
candidates’ match seems no more patient than the famously impatient
Rudolf Spielmann’s technical exploitation against Alexander Alekhine
at Carlsbad 1923. One can
probably find a game played by stodgy Adolf Schwarz (he, who could
essay 1. e4 e5 2. d4 exd4
3. c3 Qe7 4. f3?
against Tarrasch) that looks like a Tal crescendo and a game played by
Tal that looks like a Schwarz sedative.
Yet if one plays through the oeuvres of, say, attack dog
Rashid Nezhmetdinov and somnolent Ulf Andersson, one will see two
different approaches to playing chess.
These different approaches make me want to know more about the
men behind the pieces, just as viewing a Van Gogh collection draws me
to learning more about the man who painted those pictures and about
the places that once knew him and now know him no more.
Of course, literature and painting
move most people far more than do the moves of chess.
The novels of Dickens and Dostoevsky eclipse the fireworks of
Fischer and Alekhine; and the lives of the great Impressionists leave
an impress that the lives of chess masters do not.
Art, like the universe, is hierarchy.
And I, for one, think that Grandmaster Larry Evans got it just
right when he described chess as “a minor contemplative art.” |
