Man Ray Chess Set

This modern chess set is one of the most important designs of the 20th century. Man Ray (1890-1976), a significant contributor to the Dada and Surrealist movements, had a long career pioneering work in photography, painting and sculpture. As with his friends Salvador Dali and Marcel Duchamp, the theme chess was reflected in many of his works. This licensed beech wood set is a reproduction of Man Ray’s set housed in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

In his first design of chess pieces Man Ray used pure Euclidean geometric forms – cube, sphere, pyramid and cone. He still made iconic associations such as the pyramid with the Egyptian symbol of kingship, the cone with medieval queen’s headgear and the flagon with the bishop’s tradition of creating exotic liqueurs and spirits. Dadaist that he was, he could not resist interjecting at least one discordant, though somehow congruent, element into the ensemble. He based the form of the Knight on a found object in his studio - the head scroll of a violin. Its form is also based on pure geometry, that of the Fibonacci sequence that defines spiral growth patterns in nature.

This set ships free anywhere in Canada.