---
name: "Alexander Calder Chess Set"
subtitle: "Calder's own 1944 chess set, 3D-scanned from the one he kept at home"
date: 2026-07-21
category: design
topics: [design-and-art, gadgets-and-toys]
tags: [chess, calder, sculpture, giftable]
link: "https://cahiersdart.com/products/calder-chess-set"
linkText: "cahiersdart.com"
description: "Cahiers d'Art and the Calder Foundation milled a facsimile of Calder's 1944 chess set from high-resolution 3D scans of the original — red and blue instead of black and white, and a queen taller than the king."
source: "MoMA Design Store"
fromFind: alexander-calder-chess-set
---

import { Image } from 'astro:assets';
import hero from './hero.jpg';

<Image src={hero} alt="Alexander Calder's chess set: turned wooden pieces in red and blue, the queen taller than the king, arranged on a board." />

> In 1944 Calder designed a chess set for a show that also hung Duchamp, Ernst and Tanguy — then kept this one for himself and played on it at home in Roxbury. Cahiers d'Art and the Calder Foundation have milled a facsimile from high-resolution scans of the original.

The exhibition was *The Imagery of Chess*, at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York, 12 December 1944 to 31 January 1945 — a group show of paintings, sculpture, newly designed chessmen, music and miscellany, which is exactly the sort of billing that decade produced. Calder showed two sets. The original pieces are catalogued by the Calder Foundation simply as wood and paint, on an eighteen-inch board, which undersells what he did with them.

Two decisions make the set. The first is colour: red and blue rather than black and white, which quietly removes the built-in hierarchy of the standard set — no light side, no dark side, no side that moves first because it is the lighter one. The second is proportion. Calder's queen stands taller than his king, and the knight is oversized past any structural need. On a board where the queen is the most powerful piece and the king the one you are merely protecting, making the king the smaller figure is less a joke than a correction, and it is visible from across a room.

The reissue is a collaboration between Cahiers d'Art and the Calder Foundation. Rather than working from drawings or photographs, they scanned the physical pieces at high resolution and milled the reproductions from solid wood to the original dimensions — the stated aim being to keep the texture and scale of handmade objects rather than produce a clean modern interpretation of them. That distinction matters here: Calder's originals are turned, slightly irregular things, and a tidied-up version would have lost the thing that makes them read as sculpture.

The honest caveats. It is $2,500, which puts it in the territory of an art object you happen to be able to play on rather than a chess set you happen to like the look of — Cahiers d'Art describes it as "a facsimile of a rarefied art object" and that is the right framing. It is a facsimile, not an original, and it is not the historically standard shape, so a serious player will find the pieces harder to read at speed than a Staunton set. And the provenance detail that MoMA leads with — that this is specifically the set Calder kept for his own play at Roxbury, Connecticut, rather than one of the others he designed that decade — comes from the retailers rather than the Foundation's own catalogue entry, which records only the exhibition history.

None of that changes what is on the board. It is in stock, it is playable, and the queen is taller than the king.
