The artist at the board

Marcel Duchamp, one of the most famous artists of the twentieth century, largely stopped making art around 1923 to play chess seriously. He played for France in several Chess Olympiads.

He said that while not all artists are chess players, all chess players are artists. The novelist Vladimir Nabokov agreed in his own way: he wrote a novel about a chess master, The Defense, and composed chess problems, which he published beside his poems.