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Laura Kuhn talks this week with Larry List, a New York-based curator and artist who’s been engaged for years with artists and composers whose works and lives have involved chess. They talk primarily about List’s “The Imagery of Chess Revisited,” an exhibition that recreated a show that originally took place at the Julian Levy Gallery in New York City in 1944, which in its re-creation took place at the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, New York, in 2005-2006; most of the original artists were featured, including Alexander Calder, Isamu Noguchi, Robert Motherwell, André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Dorothea Tanning, and others, including Cage’s wife at the time, Xenia.

Cage’s contribution to the 1944 Levy Gallery show was a work made especially for it – Chess Pieces – originally conceived as an ink-and-goache piece that contained black and white music notation that filled an array of squares on a 19 x 19” Masonite board. In List’s preparatory work, he managed to locate, borrow, and then closely examine virtually all of the works from the original show. Soliciting the expertise of the well-known Cage pianist, Margaret Leng Tan, it was discovered that Cage’s Chess Pieces was not only a compelling visual artwork but also a coherent musical composition: a through-composed score, consisting of 22 systems of music read conventionally from left to right. Leng Tan subsequently recorded the work and thus Chess Pieces was both exhibited and first heard at “The Imagery of Chess Revisited” exhibition. As Leng Tan rightly observed, “Chess Pieces stands at the confluences of three of John Cage's primary life-long interests: music, visual arts and chess."