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The Art of Chess Pieces

287 Seiten, Leinen mit Schutzumschlag, HGS, 1994

39,95 €
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For about one and a half thousand years, from the time of emergence of chess up to now, people have been trying to render the true charm of this wise game through the chess pieces they made, displaying outstanding talent, fantasy and resourcefulness. The miniature chessmen have always been genuine works of art no matter what material they were made of (ivory or silver, mother-of-pearl or porcelain), and whether they reflected people's life at different times or were of abstact character.
The author of the album is a well-known Russian historian Dr. I.M. Linder who describes in a captivating manner the stages of evolution of figurative and abstract chess pieces from medieval to modem forms. This description is based on a thorough study of private collections and museum pieces. The richness of the art of chess pieces is shown in its entirety, including such archaeological finds as the ancient chess pieces from Afrasiab (seventh to eighth centuries, Uzbekistan), unique porcelain, ivory and metal sets of all times and lands.
The album, containing 250 black-and-white and colour illustrations, is a good gift to chess collectors and all lovers of this ancient game.


The World of Chess and the World of Art

Chess!.. Two adverse powers, sixteen pieces on each side, array their forces for silent combat on a 64-square board. They await the signal for battle to commence. And it is not some magician's wand, but the hand of Man, his controlling Reason, his deciding Will which sets them in motion.
As Man is amazed by the interdependence and harmony he finds in Nature, in chess he is struck by the unusually complex, yet at the same time coherent, system of the game, which is achieved through the interaction of all its elements - the pieces, their moves and the tactics of the battle. In the logic and illogicality, the laws and the paradoxes, the mysteries of positions and combinations there is a great attraction, and this is what makes chess an art form.
A chess combat is the most noble one mankind has ever known: bloodless, striking for the depth of thought, the reflexion of human passions and the sense of beauty it invokes.
One of the greatest boons is what Voltaire, the eighteenth-century French philosopher and enlightener, called the game of chess. In our times, the role of chess in the cultural life of society has grown to such an extent that it is rightly regarded as one of the important elements of modern civilization. Combining aspects of art, science and sport, this wise and ancient game has not only become a form of intellectual contest and a leisure pursuit, but also an acknowledged tool for the education of children and young people, a testing ground for experiments in computing and other scientific fields - and, of course, it serves to ease friendly contacts between all the peoples of our planet. Today about 130 countries are united by the International Chess Federation (FIDE).
Chess has a rare appeal to man's aesthetic sense. "I am very fond of chess: it combines art and science. It brings me relaxation and inspiration", the great twentieth-century composer, Dmitry Shostakovich, said.
The ability of human beings to perceive the world in an aesthetic way finds a completely natural artistic expression in chess. There is no other game in the history of mankind which has been so widely reflected in folk art and in literature, in painting and drawing, and especially in applied art, which over the many centuries has created a whole world of chessmen.
And this world can tell us much, helping us discover the secrets of the origins of chess and of its spread around the Earth. The game, as we know, appeared in its earliest version in India in the first centuries after the birth of Christ; then in Central Asia in the fifth or sixth century it took on a new form, the one by which we know it today, as the symbolic representation of a military encounter with a large number of different participants - from foot soldiers and cavalry to generals and kings. As early as the Middle Ages, the game had spread across the immense land-mass of Europe and Asia, adapting itself easily to local conditions, with both the military standards and the general way of life of a particular people finding reflection in the terminology and in the appearance of chess pieces. Since the rules did not change, chess remained an area of common ground between people of different ethnic backgrounds. This was also assisted by the creation in the early Middle Ages in the Middle East of new, more abstract, Arab pieces, which subsequently, with various modifications, spread from the Middle East through Europe.
With the advent of chess, people have always striven to make the chessmen, especially the figurative ones which accord with the national names for the individual pieces, reflect the fascination for the game that they themselves feel, and they have demonstrated great imagination in doing so. This is reflected in the depiction of the life of the age, in the personification of the pieces, in the recreation of images from mythology or from well-known works of literature, in the presentation of various events from world history and in other ways.
All sorts of materials have been used to make chess sets over the past one and a half thousand years: elephant and walrus ivory, wood and ceramics, silver and gold, steel and bronze, mother-of-pearl and amber, porcelain and glass, and, more recently, various types of plastic.
Today chess sets belonging to the people of various continents and various ages from a part of the cultural riches of these nations and are kept in the great museums and private collections of Moscow and St.Petersburg, London and Paris, Munich and Nuremberg, Vienna and New York. The collectors try to make the valuable objects they have acquired the subject of scholarly study and also to make them known to wide circles of lovers of the game, by putting together exhibitions, organizing seminars and so on. These were the motives which a few years ago, on the initiative of American collectors, led enthusiasts to create an international organization - Chess Collectors International (CCI).
Today it is affiliated to FIDE and already has a membership representing over twenty countries. These members are owners of collections of great artistic, cultural and historical value. Historians of chess culture are also involved in the activities of the organization. CCI regularly arranges international meetings and congresses working in close co-operation with the main museums of the countries where forums are organized. Exhibitions of chess pieces are arranged on the basis of the collections of these museums and of private persons. In this way, the Third Congress, held in Munich in 1988, had three major exhibitions and a seminar on the history of chess pieces, as well as an exhibition for sale of the works of contemporary painters on chess-related themes. The author of the present volume, who presented papers on the ancient chess pieces at this forum and at the subsequent congresses in New York in 1990 and in Paris in 1992, was particularly impressed by the energetic activities of the first CCI President Dr. George A. Dean (USA) and of the national organizing committees headed by Dr. Thomas H. Thomsen (Germany), Gareth Williams (Great Britain) and Floyd Sarisohn (USA), which turned the regular congresses of CCI into a notable landmark in the development of present-day chess culture. The splendid exhibition catalogues together with authoritative scholarly works on chess pieces, which have appeared in the USA and a number of European countries in the last decades, serve to give some idea of the unusual variety that is to be found in the chess sets produced by many peoples from the Middle Ages through to the twentieth century and, of course, of the ever-growing world interest in the study of the links between chess culture and art with chess pieces as an original trend in small-scale plastic art.
In foreign art books and catalogues, it is possible to come across only few isolated examples of chess pieces in Russia between the eighteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, now kept in Western European museums or private collections which in no way reflects the true development of the art of chess pieces in Russia - a country known for a high level of chess culture and chess traditions extending back over many centuries. Occupying a huge part of Europe and Asia, Russia and some neighbouring countries include the region of Central Asia, where the game of chess first appeared in the early Middle Ages, and also the territory of the first Russian state, Rus, where the game underwent a thousand years of development, in many ways similar to that which took place in Western Europe. Thus, chess has become an inseparable part of Russian national culture. Large-scale archaeological investigations have been carried out in these areas in resent years and these have led to the discovery of priceless articles of chess culture from the early and late Middle Ages, to finds in Central Asia of the oldest known chess pieces, dating to the seventh and eighth centuries, and of several hundred pieces from between the tenth and the seventeenth centuries in the towns of Old Rus. They have permitted the author of the present volume to trace the evolution of chess forms from the mediaeval Arab pieces to the modern Staunton type.
While abstract chess forms in Russia developed essentially in the same direction as in the countries of the West, figurative pieces - made from ivory, wood, porcelain, metal and plastic - retained much that was unique and linked to national terminology and to the specific nature of the applied art of the peoples of Russia. The tradition of producing figurative chess sets is one which has survived here to the present day.
Russia, the first country to pave man's way into space, was also a pioneer of chess in outer space. To play the game under conditions of weightlessness demanded the creation of a special "cosmic" chess set.
To tell about chess pieces from the earliest days of the game's existence to the present, and on into a distant future of interplanetary voyages, to show the evolution of these pieces over the almost one and a half millennia of chess history on the territory of Russia and the neighbouring countries - this is the task which the author has set himself.
The changes which took place in the form of pieces were not chance occurrences and in many ways they are connected with the development of chess as a whole. This obliges us to preface a discussion of the pieces themselves with an brief excursion into the history of chess - to the extent that it will be of use in better understanding the questions of the evolution of pieces.
Naturally the presentation of all artistically and historically valuable chess sets in their entirety would scarcely be possible. The present volume is a first attempt to present chess pieces which belong to a number of Russian museums in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novgorod and Suzdal, museums of the countries of the "near abroad" in Kiev, Minsk, Vitebsk, Trakai, Samarkand, etc. and also to various private collections.
Weitere Informationen
EAN 5768803863
Gewicht 720 g
Hersteller HGS
Breite 14,5 cm
Höhe 20,1 cm
Medium Buch
Erscheinungsjahr 1994
Autor Isaak Linder
Sprache Englisch
ISBN-10 5768803863
Seiten 287
Einband Leinen mit Schutzumschlag
Contents

007 The World of Chess and the World of Art
013 An Excursion into History
057 Carved pieces "with faces"
169 The Evolution of Abstract Symbolism
280 Notes
283 Bibliography