Naked Chess: How to Win

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A couple days later I went to the gallery and Walter was there, alone except for the cow’s skull on the mannequin’s body with an arm holding a cigarette holder, alone except for a papier-mâché model of a woman over a sewing machine you pumped with your foot to make her pump up and down. The installation, titled Roxy’s, was a scale-model World War II–era Nevada whorehouse with a jukebox that played Glenn Miller, and the skull lady was the madam. I still have this because I have everything he gave me except a signed Lichtenstein (I always lose the art). I have memories of his voice, a silver bullet, convictions about how to see, and of course, Marcel. Pasadena, whose sole claim to fame was the Rose Parade, was now anxiously awaiting the Big Private Party at the Green Hotel before the Public Opening of the Duchamp show. One might assume that Marcel Duchamp who had a leaning towards self-fashioning initiated the picture showing himself and the naked woman playing chess. But it was Eve Babitz, the naked woman, who became an icon through the picture - and through her life as "L.A. Women.

A visitor looks at Fountain (1917) by Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). The public urinal that Duchamp transformed into a work of art and is seen as the paradigm of the readymade. Photograph: Nils Jorgensen/REX Mirandi Babitz: Julian was off doing his thing, taking pictures, so I was pretty much on my own. It was O.K. because I knew the L.A. artists. At least I knew Ed. Evie had already brought him home for Thanksgiving. He loved my mother’s cooking. “Mae Babitz sure is good to her boys,” is what he used to say. Late in 1990, when the Duchamp-on-the-West-Coast book ( West Coast Duchamp) was being prepared, the Shoshana Wayne Gallery used our picture, blown up big on silver paper, to announce its own show of his work in conjunction with a symposium to be held in the Santa Monica Public Library. Unlike the party at the Green Hotel, to this thing I was very invited.While Anna here is not exactly my type, she gets huge bonus points for helping push Chess towards the “sport” it could be.

Still no ChessBase Account? learn more > My Games – Access your games from everywhere. Store your games, training material and opening repertoire in the cloud. Annotate, analyze and share. Of course, by now even I have forgiven Walter for leaving LA, and we are happy to give him any chance we can, and though most of those Ruscha fans probably had no idea the man sitting beside him was really the One as far as art in LA is concerned, we who were there realize that Ed couldn’t have happened without the strange days of long ago.

But now get this. The 2017 Womens World Tournament is in Iran this year. Nazi won’t be going, because she refuses to adhere to hijab dress code. And thats not a joke by the way. When the pictures were made, Babitz was a 20-year-old student at Los Angeles Community College. The daughter of a violinist and an artist, and the goddaughter of Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, Babitz was already at ease in a sophisticated, aesthetic milieu. She integrated herself into L.A.’s slowly burgeoning art scene, partying with Billy Al Bengston, Ed Kienholz, Kenneth Price, and the men who’d become integral to the California Light and Space movement: Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, and Peter Alexander. Years later, she also became romantically involved with both Ed Ruscha and his brother. Babitz fully embraced her role as an art groupie. He proceeded to digress into a story about how this Lautrec guy was the one who had long ago shown him the work of a teenage artist whose last name was Ferus, but how before Walter could meet Ferus, Ferus committed suicide. Perhaps in Walter’s mind, the reason he killed himself was because nobody encouraged him, nothing in LA existed where someone strange and weird could feel safe. And although Walter never said this out loud, I think the reason the gallery was called Ferus was so never again would someone in Los Angeles have to kill himself over art. it seemed to me that there were things going on that I could pursue, that no matter what they thought in New York about everyone else being totally out of it and hopeless, on the West Coast things were happening and that it was art and that Walter was the One and these were the Times. Sitting in the audience, even though mostly I didn’t get it, I at least had the feeling there was something to get.

Somehow it was decided that we were all going to Kienholzes house in Laurel Canyon. It was crowded and rustic and I was beginning to feel left out when Walter sat beside me and offered to show me Ed’s show, “among other things,” if I came to the gallery the next day. Billy Al Bengston: Walter was a wild guy, very interesting. You know he’d sleep in a rug like a taco? Yeah, he’d come over to your house and the next thing you know, your rug would be rolled up, and you’d say, “Oh, Chico’s here.” Julian Wasser: Time told me to cover the event and so that’s what I did. I knew it was going to be big. Duchamp hadn’t had a show in something like 50 years. George and I walked to Fred Segal’s, this fancy clothing store with a café inside. And sitting there, George told me Chico stories, the one I especially loved being about how, when Walter curated this huge California Art show in San Francisco, he wanted to go to the party thrown by the artists who’d been omitted—and George said he’d go with him as his bodyguard if Chico would give George money for his rent in exchange. Since Walter couldn’t possibly go into this room full of people he’d personally excluded without a bodyguard, he agreed. “He promised to give me the money before he left,” George explained, “but suddenly I looked up and he’d gone. Without paying me. The party lasted all night. The next morning, Chico shows up again….”Since Walter had left LA, I’d seen him twice in Washington, but then he’d gone to organize the Menil Collection, in Houston, which is famous for having more money than the mere Smithsonian. He was probably down there, filling Mrs. de Menil’s head with his digressions. Of all the things that have ever gone on between men and women, this was the strangest, in my experience. But it got stranger. For one thing, there were Teamsters in the next room, moving paintings, and they couldn’t help but be amazed.

Laurie Pepper, not at the party but in the vicinity of the party, 23: Cousin of Eve and Mirandi. She’d later marry jazz musician and junkie Art Pepper and co-write his memoir, Straight Life, also a dynamite Southern California book.In Hollywood, there was a genuine collector couple, Walter and Louise Arensberg, who amassed Duchamp works as though Los Angeles were a totally cultivated city where you’d expect people to know what was happening artwise in the twentieth century—like Gertrude Stein and her brother, who knew what was what practically before anything was anything. Only the Steins were in Paris, where art was in the air, whereas the Arensbergs were in Los Angeles, where if you could draw, you’d be good if you were Walt Disney. Still no ChessBase Account? learn more > Real Fun against a Chess Program! Play, analyze and train online against Fritz. Beginner, club and master levels. Assisted play and calculation training. In typically singular fashion, Marcel Duchamp was 76 years old when he had his first career retrospective. The artist chose to present it in the unlikely location of Pasadena, a quiet, upscale Los Angeles suburb. The 1963 show was a coup for the visionary young gallerist Walter Hopps, whose Ferus Gallery formed the nexus of an emerging LA art scene. The opening night party at the Hotel Green drew people like Andy Warhol, who a year earlier had exhibited his soup cans at Ferus, as well as young and eager local artists like Ed Moses, Larry Bell, Ed Ruscha and Joe Goode. Most had had work in Hopps’ previous show, New Painting of Common Objects, in 1962, commonly considered the first exhibit dedicated to pop art. Walter was like Proust, he had so many story lines going on in his head. He didn’t restrict his story lines merely to the past and present, he sort of projected them into the future, and once, when we were in Kenny Price’s studio, Kenny told me, “I don’t like Walter to come here like this; when he sees what you’re doing, he suddenly is seven jumps ahead of you. Like he knows what you will be doing. And then, he leans.” Not drugs,” George said. “Art. He was holding art. Probably stuff he stole from me or some other guy’s studio. If you caught him, he’d always say he was saving things from being stepped on, but I always knew he was stealing!”