LIPNITSKY WIJK AND WR WORLD RAPID AND BLITZ

MAY 2023 USChess.org

ARONIAN WINS
WR MASTERS
FIRST MOVES Chess news from around the U.S.
The Chess
Players
Happy 40th birthday to a chess
sculpture that rubs elbows with
real power.
BY MENACHEM WECKER
UST AS THE THREE MOST
J
important factors in real es-
tate are said to be “location,
location, location,” sculptures
also derive significance from
their placement. In Florence,
Italy — one of the world’s great
cities for sculpture — medieval artists outdid
one another, whether making their sculp-
tures taller than those down the road or de-
liberately installing figures that turned their
backs on rival artworks. And those lucky
enough to have their work installed outside
major buildings gained the equivalence of a
coveted invite to an exclusive party.
Lloyd Lillie’s life-sized, bronze sculpture
The Chess Players, which celebrates its 40th
birthday this year, is neither as well-known
nor impressive as Michelangelo’s David in
Florence’s Accademia Gallery. But the two
men in three-piece suits playing chess sit
in one of the most significant places in the
country, if not the world.
The artwork — in which one man leans
forward, pretzel-like, in a thinking pose,
and the other sits back holding a bishop — is
installed in John Marshall Memorial Park in
Washington, D.C. Nearby, a large statue of the
park’s namesake, the longest serving chief
justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1801-35),
looks down on the plot, which is sandwiched
between the beige, modern classical E. Bar-
rett Prettyman United States Courthouse and
the modernist Canadian Embassy.
Were the sculpted players to look up from
their chess, they could see several District
courthouses and the National Gallery of
Art. They sit practically in the shadow of
the majestic U.S. Capitol, some half a mile
away. It is hard to imagine many sites that
could be more powerful than the one where
this chess game is frozen in bronze, and, as
6 MAY 2023 USCHESS.ORG
the 1983 statue enters its fifth decade, it is
a good time to explore the work’s story and
what it means for a memorialization of chess
to sit in the nation’s capital, juxtaposed with
iconic symbols of justice.
A Washington native, Lillie studied art at
the Corcoran School of Art in the District
(now part of The George Washington Uni-
versity) and at Skowhegan School of Painting
and Sculpture in New York before attending
and then graduating from Boston’s School of
the Museum of Fine Arts. He worked in Italy
and in France and subsequently taught art
for decades at Boston University. His work,
according to the National Academy of Design
website, can be found, in part, at the Boston
Public Library and the U.S. Embassies in
Yemen and Saudi Arabia.
The artist, who died in 2020 at 87, once
talked about sculpture in almost mysti-
cal terms in an interview with the Boston
Globe. He compared it to “watching an image
emerge, watching it come to life, starting
with wet clay and discovering an image that
has a kind of presence to it.”
Lillie was known for modeling family
members for his sculptures. His father posed
for the older chess player in Washington, and
the younger figure is based on Lillie’s son, per
the Smithsonian American Art Museum web-
site. A 2020 Globe obituary noted that Lillie’s
late wife Barbara modeled for a sculpture of
an early women’s-rights advocate.
The artist had a “gift for depicting move-
ment owed much to the careful attention
he paid to those from whom he drew inspi-
ration, and to his willingness to recognize
that real life could be more interesting than
the plans he had made,” the Globe reported.
Why Lillie was commissioned to create
this sculpture and how it ended up in its
current location remain open questions.
Marshall used to live near the park, and,
according to the website of the National
Capitol Planning Commission — a nearly
100-year-old agency established by Con-
gress — chess was a “favorite pastime” of
the chief justice’s.
In an 1875 book, biographer Henry Flan-
ders quotes Josiah Quincy (1772-1864) saying
that, as a member of Congress from 1805-13,
he played chess with Marshall. Quincy, the
former Boston mayor and Harvard Univer-
sity president, “never failed to be impressed
with the frank, cordial, child-like simplicity,
and unpretending manner” of Marshall,
per the quote, which Harvard law profes-
sor James Bradley repeats in a March 1901
Atlantic article.
A web page for a 2001 exhibit at the Li-
brary of Virginia records Marshall as “an
able chess player” and “formidable quoits
player.” (Quoits is a ring-tossing game, per-
haps with ancient or medieval origins.) The
Marshall papers at College of William and
Mary contain a reference from Marshall’s
son recording his dad as “playing chess with
Mr. [?] James? Taylor of Norfolk.”
And the magazine of the National En-
dowment for the Humanities reported in
2013 that rumors circulated that Marshall
and John Wickham, Aaron Burr’s lawyer,
planned Burr’s trial outcome over a private
game of chess.
But this evidence does not convince
everyone.
When first approached with questions
PHOTO: MENACHEM WECKER
about the chess-playing chief justice, Har-
low Unger, a journalist and author of many
books, including John Marshall: The Chief
Justice who Saved the Nation (2014), said he
had read nothing of the sort.
Unger went through the entire, 12-volume
John Marshall papers and came up empty.
 He combed through the index of the sev-
en-volume writings of Marshall’s lifelong
friend James Monroe and uncovered zero
chess references. Marshall and Monroe va-
cationed together with their families, which
should yield chess references if that was
part of their repertoire, he hypothesized.
It is undeniable that Marshall was an
enthusiastic quoits player, according to
Unger. “I find it hard to believe I would
have overlooked anything in his personal
life that meant as much to him as you have
discovered,” he said of chess.
Unger advised skepticism about the claim
Marshall was an avid chess player. “His love
of quoits is all over the place, but not a word
about chess,” he said. “Apart from its ab-
sence from 12 hefty volumes of his papers,
it’s especially astonishing that Albert Beve-
ridge fails to mention it in his thick, four
volume bio, which goes into detail about
Marshall’s personal life and his love for and
participation in quoits at his Quoits Club.
But not a single quotation regarding chess.”
Marshall may have played chess, Unger al-
lows, but it was not an obsession like quoits.
Whether he actually played chess may be
as lost to time. But the placement of Lillie’s
sculpture near Marshall’s sculpture and all
of those courts makes good sense.
Both chess and the law are highly log-
ical. They have stoic aspects but are also
performative. Chess has
opening, middle, and end
game sequences, just as
court cases have opening
and closing arguments. And
both, despite their adher-
ence to logic, are also sub-
ject to biases and exclusion,
if one isn’t careful.
When Mark Kende is not
directing the Constitutional
Law Center at Drake Uni-
versity Law School in Des
Moines, Iowa — where he
is also James Madison chair
in constitutional law and
professor of law — he plays
chess tournaments. He has
also written on the game,
PHOTOS: COURTESY NATASHA ROBERTS
including an article titled
“5 Ways Chess Can Make You a Better Law-
yer.” He had not seen Lillie’s sculpture but
had thoughts on the intersection of chess
and the law.
Kende knows of at least a dozen law pro-
fessors who are avid chess players, and he
thinks that makes sense, given that both law
and chess draw upon analytical ability, stra-
tegic skills, and logical thinking. Studying
the law could make one a better chess player,
but Kende thinks that chess can have more
of an impact on future attorneys.
Kende played chess in middle and high
school and was one of the best junior players
at the time in New York, he said. In college
his playing tapered off, but then he took the
game up again in his early 30s. “It’s a great
hobby to have,” he said.
Even notoriously-overworked law stu-
dents find the time to play chess “as a way
to take a break and build up a friendship,
camaraderie,” Kende said. “If you’re not
particularly athletic, you can still play.” It
helps that playing can clear your mind,
since it forces you to think only about the
position in front of you, he said. “It serves
kind of as an escape.”
As the son of an artist — Kende’s mom did
some sculpture — he tried his hand at a bit
of art criticism of the chess players sitting
among D.C. courts. “The symbolism of the
amazing democratic country that we’ve
built — with all of its flaws — is still funda-
mentally an amazing creation,” he said. “You
can make an argument that a good game of
chess, or playing a game of chess at a high
level, involves also creating a masterpiece.”
Marshall is controversial today, espe-
cially after a legal historian published a
book demonstrating that the chief justice
owned more slaves than had been previous-
ly known and mistreated
them. Several law schools
have removed Marshall’s
name from their schools.
Kende understands why
many support that remov-
al. “On the other hand, we
can’t forget the brilliance of
some of the things he did,”
Kende said. “He essentially
built our judiciary.”
One of the most famous
cases that Marshall heard
was Marbury v. Madison
(1803), which established
the concept of “judicial
review,” meaning that the
court could find that an act
of Congress was unconsti-
tutional. “The court’s opin-
ion, written by Chief Justice John Marshall,
is considered one of the foundations of U.S.
constitutional law,” according to Encyclope-
dia Britannica.
Another very significant case came 16
years later in McCulloch v. Maryland, which
Kende calls “so brilliant.” Marshall decided
in that case that federal power included
things that the Constitution implies, and
not only what it spells out blatantly. The
case represented “one of [Marshall’s] most
important decisions regarding the expansion
of Federal power,” according to the National
Archives website.
Marshall’s decision in the 1819 case, argu-
ably, became the source that Congress used
to pass some of the broadest laws prohibit-
ing discrimination, according to Kende. But
the fact remains that many have legitimate
concerns about memorializing Marshall.
“Could one get energized and say that [me-
morializing him] is a bad thing? Yes. Should
one? That’s a tough question. I would just say
he’s a complicated person,” he said.
Visiting the park dozens of times, in dif-
ferent seasons, I am struck that the whole
setting is even more pregnant with mean-
ing given the mystery and controversy that
surrounds it. Whatever one thinks of the
Marshall sculpture nearby, the chess players
are not a depiction of the chief justice. And
it’s not even clear to what extent, if at all,
Marshall actually played the game.
The sculpture once included 27 pieces on
the chess board, but those are long gone.
Just three pawns remain attached to the
bench, and the one bishop can be seen in
the player’s hand.
Passersby clearly connect with the sculp-
ture. I have seen people put scarves on
the players. I have seen chess pieces and
chess boards inserted between the players.
Someone decided to leave chess pieces on
a nearby copy of a sundial from Marshall’s
Richmond, Va., garden too, so the chess
game has literally extended throughout
the park.
In short, Lillie achieved something inter-
active here, which is exactly what two bronze
ambassadors of a beautiful game ought to
be doing in one of the most powerful neigh-
borhoods in the world: pitching a wonderful
cause, that is in the public good.
For up-to-date chess news and
analysis, check out Chess Life
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