AN ENGLISH CUBIST

BOB DAVENPORT:

The Chess Players : A Chequered Response

Illustration © The Estate of John David Roberts. Reproduced with the permission of the William Roberts Society. Text © Bob Davenport, from the September 2012 William Roberts Society Newsletter

The Chess Players, 1929–30
Oil on canvas, 101.5 cm x 92 cm

The sale of William Roberts's The Chess Players 1929–30 for £1,161,250, after a four-way bidding battle at Sotheby's on 10 May 2012, was a striking vindication not only of Roberts but also of this painting, which had not always been well received.

In 1931 P. G. Konody in The Observer described it as 'a dramatic rendering of a whole phase of human life and nature' and praised Roberts's 'faculty of stating with unerring precision the essential character of certain aspects of humanity'. [1] Then in 1934–5 the picture was one of 253 works of 'Contemporary British Art' which the Empire Art Loan Collections Society sent to tour New Zealand and Australia.

The tour began in Christchurch. The review in the Christchurch Press was polite, but comments in the paper's letters columns were less so, and The Chess Players was the main target of criticism. 'Poker Ned', for example, described it as showing 'some men playing chess with glassy marbles stuck in their heads to represent their eyeballs', and claimed he had been advised to 'move back 15 feet and stand on my head [to] get the beauty of the picture'. He had really gone to the show, he said, 'to divert my mind from what Larwood was going to do next, but while there I was sorry I did not have Larwood with me practising bodyline bowling' (which was odd, as the controversially aggressive English bowler Harold Larwood had by then ended his Test career). [2]

'Much Disappointed' complained of WR's 'decadent figures with small heads and monstrous hands', and saw in many of the pictures 'the modern worship of ugliness instead of beauty'. [3] A. Wells Newton was baffled by 'the mentality of a man who depicts fellow human being as [Roberts] does . . . Does this man hold a low view of his fellow creatures, or is this merely his joke against the critics?' For him, Roberts's work was 'not art, but rather . . . a travesty of art, a stultification of and almost one might say a prostitution of art'. [4] And there was more in the same vein.

It was left to W. Basil Honour of the modernist New Zealand Society of Artists to point out that 'Mr. Newton makes the obvious error of criticising pictures because he does not like them. He does not like them because he does not understand them or know them. In front of a piece of intricate machinery he would remain mute. But before a work of art he expands himself. He assumes it should be something in the nature of a reproduction of his own vision of things, and is annoyed that artists are not so flattering.' [5]

In Adelaide it was much the same story, with one of the writers to The Advertiser detecting 'the spirit of Bolshevism' in the works as a whole [6], and another declaring that 'pictures such as "The Chess Players," by William Roberts, appear to me as an affront to all that is lovely and beautiful in art.' [7]

In Melbourne The Argus 's reviewer commented that 'The player in the foreground with the diminutive cranium appears to be innocent of the possible violence in the rolling blue eyes of his companions; the lady with the enormous deltoids looks a match for anyone with either dagger or pistol; and the lady with the luxuriant bosom looks completely "fed up" not only with her lay figure hands, which cannot turn the page, but with everything else.' [8] And so it went on.

In contrast, when the picture was shown in Wolverhampton in 1937, the Express and Star seemed quite restrained in its comment that it 'irresistibly reminds one of a trio of American gangsters and their "molls"', with its 'crude forms intentionally created by an artist who can also produce the vivid and handsome "Creole Woman", in which anatomical knowledge is demonstrated to be complete'. [9]

NOTES
[1] P. G. Konody, 'Mr. Willam Roberts', The Observer, 1 November 1931
[2] The Press (Christchurch), 25 June 1934
[3] Ibid., 29 June 1934.
[4] Ibid., 30 June 1934.
[5] Ibid., 4 July 1934.
[6] William C. Quin in The Advertiser (Adelaide), 18 February 1935.
[7] Olive Neville in ibid., 25 February 1935.
[8] Arthur Streeton in The Argus (Melbourne), 29 May 1935.
[9] 'Modern art shocks for Wolverhampton', Express and Star (Wolverhampton), 13 March 1937.

POSTSCRIPT (March 2019)
On 26 May 1934 The Chess Players was reviewed as follows in the chess column of the Otago Daily Times (NZ):

THE PICTURE "THE CHESS PLAYERS."
For a picture to be artistic it must be well done. Details introduced should be more or less correct. Although modern thought is of opinion that it is comparatively unimportant what the method of artistic expression may be, it is false in art for educated and trained men to imitate the styles of less cultured beings. After making the above brief statements of fact we draw attention to the painting, "The Chess Players," by William Roberts. It is at present being exhibited at Dunedin. For those Chess players who may be interested, and also for those who know very little about Chess, we explain that, the game position depicted is one that none but the very weakest of players would arrive at. . . . White (the player in the picture with his hand behind his head) is queen, rook, and the exchange down, and has a hopeless position. He has just lost his queen for Black (the one with the forearm with length and breadth but no thickness) has it in his hand. White is apparently astounded at his last loss, but it is clear to us that he should have realised his troubles at least a move or two sooner. In fact he should have already resigned, although he has not actually been mated. We believe that the painter mistimed the dramatic moment; the Chess position is not coinciding with the expressions he has given the figures. Whatever may be said about the other features of the picture, the Chess part of it lacks art.