Chess
BY PHILIDOR
Nu. 22. I. NEUMANN (ISRAEL) WHITE, 7 men.
FASHION IN CHESS Chess is as subject to changes in fashion as women's clothes. Just as the waist line goes up and down and the female figure suffers a number of other arbitrary changes of apparent shape, so do the variations of the French Defence rise and fall in popularity and there is a sudden craze for keeping back your centre and developing on the flanks (a kind of tight-laced hour-glass fashion).
But rather less superficial comparisons than this can be made: there is, in fact, an interesting parallel between the more fundamental ideas in chess and those in art. It may be a little far- fetched to compare the 'naturalistic' style 01 chess of the Morphy, Anderssen and earlier periods with naturalistic painting, and the 'dull,' more highly technical close play of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century with impressionists and post-impressionists, but I am quite sure there was a real connection between developments in the Twenties in chess and corresponding events in painting. In the 1920s the chess hyper-modern school led by Breyer, Reti and Tartakower was created and defied all the classical tenets of development and occupa- tion of the centre—and by a series of brilliant victories, culminating in Reti's win against the reigning champion, Capablanca, in New York 1924 (the latter's first loss for eight years) proved there was at least some truth in their theories: this is surely an exact parallel to cubism and the other non-representational schools of painting of the same time—and much the same kind of thing was said about both by adherents and opponents. Moreover, the fate of the movements was the same: after much initial opposition the ideas and techniques of the chess rebels were absorbed and used as part but not the whole of the armoury of the chess master, so that what was revolutionary in Reti's day's a commonplace now—just as every modern poster makes use of ideas and techniques of the rebels in art. Chess players—through what they can see in their own game—should, of all people, be wary of the 'it's all nonsense' argument against modern music and painting: because it has been proved not to be nonsense in chess.
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