In his first design of chess pieces, the artist Man Ray abandoned traditional, figurative shapes. Instead, his pieces represent the pure Euclidean geometric “ideal forms”. Dadaist that he was, he could not resist including at least one discordant, though still elegant, element into the ensemble. He based the form of the knight on the head scroll of a violin which he found in his studio. Its form, too, is based on geometry, namely the Fibonacci sequence which defines spiralling growth in numeric sequences and is also widely observed in nature.

Design: Man Ray, 1920
Solid beech wood