In the sun-drenched, somewhat bewildered landscape of 1963 Pasadena, we find Walter Hopps, a man who managed the impressive feat of being a visionary curator while behaving like a colossal cad. Having organized Marcel Duchamp’s first American retrospective, Hopps made the tactical error of snubbing his paramour, Eve Babitz, from the guest list to avoid a domestic kerfuffle with his wife.
Enter the photographer Julian Wasser, a man with a camera and a refreshingly devious plan for restitution. The scheme? A chess match of the most delightfully lopsided nature. On one side sat Duchamp, the man who famously turned a porcelain urinal into high art before “retiring” to obsess over rooks and bishops. On the other sat Babitz, wearing absolutely nothing but a bobbed haircut and a look of scholarly concentration.
Julian Wasser – Marcel Duchamp And Eve Babitz (1963) Color, 1963, Mouche Gallery
It remains a tableau of exquisite absurdity: the elderly Dadaist in his Sunday best, stone-facedly contemplating his Sicilian Defense while a nude twenty-year-old sits opposite him in a public gallery. When Hopps finally strolled in, the sight was so thoroughly unexpected that his Double Mint gum beat a hasty, gravitational retreat from his mouth. Thus, through Wasser’s lens, a moment of petty romantic revenge was transmuted into a masterpiece of conceptual cheekiness, proving that in the world of art, the best way to say “checkmate” is often in the buff.
Julian Wasser – Duchamp Playing Chess with a Nude (Eve Babitz), Duchamp Retrospective, Pasadena Art Museum, 1963, 2015, Robert Berman Gallery
via artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-marcel-duchamp-played-chess-naked-eve-babitz
