The colour of silence: art, chess and synaesthesia

In an essay for TheArticle published on December 7 last year, Jay Elwes posed here a provocative question: who was the greatest artist of the twentieth century? Ella Fitzgerald was Jay’s answer. I would prefer to nominate Marcel Duchamp, about whom I have also written previously in this column. Duchamp’s reputation is based on both his art and his chess, and the key link between the two was the incorporation into his art of a maxim of the sublime chess strategist, the Latvian Grandmaster Aron Nimzowitsch: that beauty resides, not in optical appearance, but in the pressure of thought behind what is openly visible, audible or perceptible by any of our senses.

This brings me to that celebrated poem by Charles Baudelaire, in which he extols the possibility of trans-sensory perception, in other words: Synaesthesia. I have examined various translations of Baudelaire’s “Correspondances”, without finding any of them particularly adequate to convey his message of a carnival of variegated sensual resonance, criss-crossing and liberated from borders or barriers.

Here then is my own stab at rendering the spirit of the original.

Baudelaire’s Correspondances

Of living pillars is all nature made
This temple resonates with words we find confused
Symbolic forests line our strange parade
The trees watch us, not hostile, not bemused.

Then mingling echoes reach us from afar
A shadowy abyss, a mystic unity
Vast as the darkness, yet shining with light’s clarity.
Scents, colours, sounds, converse without a bar.

The perfumes fresh, like stroking infant skin
Sweet tones of oboes, verdant as the plains
And others, rich, triumphant, corrupting
An infinite expanse tempts us at no expense
Amber, musk, incense, balsam and, yes, myrrh
All chant in transport of the spirit and the sense.

John Cage, the avant garde composer of the utterly silent piano piece “Four minutes thirty three seconds”, learned chess so that the man of silence might better communicate with Duchamp, the artist of invisible thought. In 1968, Cage and Duchamp played chess, with a board wired up, connecting chess with music, to reflect each move as a musical note. The manifestation was called “Reunion”. I knew Cage well, and in conjunction with Barry Martin, I organised a birthday party for him at the Chelsea Arts Club. Teeny Duchamp, Marcel’s widow, was a guest of honour and the cake was created in the shape of “La Fontaine”, Duchamp’s notorious inverted urinal (pictured above). One of the wittiest cartoons I ever saw was a picture of a public lavatory, with the urinal missing, having been violently wrenched off the wall. The caption proclaims: “Duchamp was here!”

For a man of silence, Cage was consistently accompanied by raucous, noisy and dramatic events. Once, while playing chess with him in my Kensington flat, a burglary took place in the apartment beneath us, during the course of which the front door was hacked open with an axe. On another occasion, during a performance at the Tate Gallery of Cage’s String Quartet, the cellist suffered an epileptic fit. I questioned Cage afterwards. Surely this was a Duchampian chance event, demanded at some random moment by the musical score? Cage denied this and put the incident down to genuine chance.

I was later fortunate enough to acquire a recording of the music created at “Reunion”. When trying to play it back, the disk was utterly silent. I should have seen that coming.

Who now bears the banner of Duchamp in both art and chess? I can think of two contemporary artists who do. Patrick Hughes combines the two and it’s impossible to avoid the detection of checkered patterns in his thought provoking reversals of Renaissance perspective.

Then there is Barry Martin (above left), official artist for the world chess championships of 1993 and 2000, involving Garry Kasparov, Nigel Short and Vladimir Kramnik, has acquired an official FIDÉ (World Chess Federation) rating and packs thought even into the vacant interstices of his works. Some of his work depicts the protagonists of the chess championships, others flood the canvas with abstract shapes, pyramidical, vertical, hinting both at nature, the passing of the seasons, even cities, such as Venice, and monumental human constructions.

Barry describes his own work thus: “Rhythm, colour sensation, application, amount, proportion, composition all play their part, but against theorising comes the ‘felt’! It’s here that the unknown begins to form and the conduit of the artist starts to unmask the amorphous shapes from the shadows; rhythms create contrapuntal movement, as in music. Stand-out colours, such as vertiginous green, resonate a distinct chord that gives a key to how further colours in juxtaposition appear to inform and enrich the viewer’s experience. Peripheral vision plays a firm hand in keeping this dialogue going!”

In keeping with Baudelaire’s trans-sensory celebration, and in the Duchamp / Cage tradition, Barry has now teamed up with the chess-loving concert pianist, Jason Kouchak (above right), originator of the giant outdoor chess board in Holland Park, to create a combined chess / music collaboration. Jason writes:

“The paintings by Barry Martin, which I first saw at the Waterhouse Dodd Gallery in Savile Row last year, inspired me most deeply. Imagining four seasons in one day as an opportunity to combine colour and music as a performance art performance. When I first saw Barry’s work, I felt lost between the spaces on a chromatic keyboard. A sense of being suspended between colours while searching for invisible light on the dark keys.”

He continues: “In my accompanying score, I am searching for colours within a black and white music framework. The concept of Chiaroscuro, the contrast between light and dark, is present in all of the musical pieces incorporating the shifts in tone, texture, and timing, as the piano moves from major to minor chords: a journey of adventure, discovery and individual expectations through colour and music. The use of silence in all the piano compositions demonstrates that the spaces between the colours, or the notes, are as important as the colours/notes themselves.”

To conclude, here is Baudelaire’s Correspondances in the original, synaesthetic French. It is a somewhat mystical creation from the advocate of the artist as the depictor of modern life, a critic who so enthusiastically predicted the bourgeois pleasures of Manet, Monet’s steam driven trains at St Lazare, or the plebeian weekends of Renoir’s vacationers at La Grenouillère.

From: Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire

Correspondances

La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers.
Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent
Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité,
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté,
Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.
II est des parfums frais comme des chairs d’enfants,
Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies,
— Et d’autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants,
Ayant l’expansion des choses infinies,
Comme l’ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l’encens,
Qui chantent les transports de l’esprit et des sens.

Our game of the week is from Round 2 of the Tata Steel Masters, at Wijk aan Zee in Holland , between world champion Magnus Carlsen and his habitual opponent, Anish Giri, which started on Saturday 15th.

Raymond Keene’s latest book “Fifty Shades of Ray: Chess in the year of the Coronavirus”, containing some of his best pieces from TheArticle, is now available from Blackwell’s.

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