Duchamp's Pipe: A Chess Romance--Marcel Duchamp and George Koltanowski [Paperback]

Shortlisted for the 2021 Vine Awards
 
Art, chess, and an $87,000 pipe frame an inside look at the relationship between Dadaist artist Marcel Duchamp and chess Grandmaster George Koltanowski

Spanning three decades, two continents, two world wars, and the international art and chess scenes of the mid twentieth century, Duchamp's Pipe explores the remarkable friendship between art world enfant terrible Marcel Duchamp and blindfold chess champion George Koltanowski. Artist and cultural historian Celia Rabinovitch describes each man's rise to prominence, the chess matches that sparked their relationship, and the recently discovered pipe that Duchamp gave to Koltanowski. This tale of genius and resilience offers fresh insights into the essence of the gift in the bohemian underground. Rabinovitch invites us to discover the chess wizard and a Duchamp slightly off pedestal--and ultimately more human.“Duchamp’s Pipe offers a delightful and fascinating study of Duchamp’s career in a manner remarkably attuned to his sensibility. This book shows how the richest form of thinking in the arts may lie in attempting to match the mind to the matter of matter.”
—CHARLES ALTIERI, professor of English at UC Berkeley and author of Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity
 
“Duchamp’s Pipe is an utterly unique book. Celia Rabinovitch has accomplished something wondrous here: a work of scholarship that is also a dream, one worthy of the Surrealist figures that populate its pages.”
—J. F. MARTEL, author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice and cohost of the Weird Studies Podcast
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