entering the field of play: new approaches to sport and art

© Association of Art Historians 2013 450

Reviews

Entering the Field of Play: New Approaches to Sport and ArtBernard Vere

Olympic Visions: Images of the Games Through History by Mike O’Mahony, London: Reaktion, 2012, 175 pp., 50 col. and 66 b. & w. illus., £22.00

Sports and American Art: From Benjamin West to Andy Warhol by Allen Guttmann, Amherst and Boston, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011, i– xvi + 277 pp., 51 col. and 45 b. & w. illus., £34.95

Cycling, Cubo-Futurism and the Fourth Dimension: Jean Metzinger’s At the Cycle-Race Track edited by Erasmus Weddigen, trans. George Hicks and Carol Escow, Venice: Peggy Guggenheim Collection, 2012, 136 pp., 84 col. and 52 b. & w. illus., €29.00

In A Philosophy of Sport, Steven Connor offered a theory

for the relative inattention that modernists have paid

to sport: ‘unlike other forms of mass entertainment,

sport could not simply be represented as part of the

ugliness, triviality and commercialism of modern

life. Sport, in short, represented a rival aesthetic to art,

or might have done, had it occurred to modernists

to allow its claims. In a sense, sport can be seen as an

anagram or anamorphic mirror of modernism.’1 But

of course sport was there in modernism, in works

such as Aleksandr Rodchenko’s Diver, 1932, or Umberto

Boccioni’s Dynamism of a Cyclist, 1913. It was there in the

writings too, as when F. T. Marinetti proclaimed that

sportsmen were the ‘fi rst neophytes’ of the futurist

‘New Ethical Religion of Speed’, or when Bauhaus

director Hannes Meyer promoted sport as that rival

aesthetic to art, writing that ‘the stadium has carried

the day against the art museum’ and instituting

athletics and dance classes at Dessau.2 The scattered

writings on sport by such luminaries as Roland

Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu and Norbert Elias suggest

that sport could be taken seriously. Maybe it was not so

much modernists themselves, but rather art historians

of modernism who denied the claims of sport. But in


Reviews

a discipline which has at times paid great attention

to debates on the body, spectacle, performance, the

regulation of leisure time and the rise of the media,

the paucity of work on organized sport, probably

the twentieth century’s most pervasive cultural

phenomenon, is bewildering.

Three recent publications seek to make good this

absence: Mike O’Mahony’s Olympic Visions is his third

work on sport. Allen Guttmann, whose previous

writings on sport have been infl uential cultural and

sociological analyses, now provides an art-historical,

single country study in his Sports and American Art. Cycling, Cubo-Futurism and the Fourth Dimension accompanies the

recent exhibition of the same name curated by Erasmus

Weddigen at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice

(June–September 2012), which took as its centrepiece

Jean Metzinger’s At the Cycle-Race Track, 1912 (plate 1).

O’Mahony’s task of historical documentation is

made diffi cult by the lack of really powerful works

of art connected to the Olympics. This is especially

apparent when contrasted with the Soviet Union’s

equivalent and rival event the Spartakiada, which

gave rise in particular to a series of well-known but

still astonishing poster designs by the constructivist

Gustav Klutsis. Unsurprisingly, given O’Mahony’s

previous work on sport in Soviet society, Klutsis and

the Spartakiada are treated in Olympic Visions and an

example is even reproduced on the back cover. The

female discus thrower in Klutsis’ poster for the 1928

event, photomontaged against an attentive Lenin and

above two columns of marching athletes, makes the

posters for the Olympics, full of classical references

and swirling fl ags, seem rather tame. This lack of

adventure is perhaps connected to Baron de Coubertin’s

vision that a revived Olympics should provide a point

of stability in a politically and morally unstable world.

The strong current of classicism reaches its most

notorious point in Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary of

the Berlin Games of 1936, Olympia. O’Mahony deals

with this impressively, providing an overview of

opposition to the ‘Nazi Games’, although some mention

of D.O.O.D., a Dutch exhibition that included Robert

Capa, Max Ernst, John Heartfi eld, Jacques Lipchitz,

C. R. W. Nevinson and Ossip Zadkine, would have

highlighted the ways in which artists also protested.

O’Mahony effectively analyses the romanticized notion

of the classical past employed by Riefenstahl, but his

real critique comes through his discussion of a much

lesser-known fi lm, Kon Ichikawa’s Tokyo Olympiad of

1964. Similar in structure and methodology to Olympia,

Ichikawa eliminates almost all classical references,

shows an aerial view of a bombed Hiroshima and

follows a young athlete from Chad as ‘an individual lost

in the crowd … an alternative to Riefenstahl’s emphasis

an authoritarian high achievement’ (79).

O’Mahony’s chapter on women’s involvement in

the Games focuses on the two superstars of women’s

tennis during the 1920s: the Frenchwoman Suzanne

Lenglen and the American Helen Wills. Although

O’Mahony treats both individuals and the wider

historical questions of women as participants in sport

extremely well, the fame of both players did not rest

on their Olympic successes alone, which were simply

part of their international dominance in tournaments

worldwide. Their celebrity, rather than their Olympic

golds, is the reason for Lenglen inspiring Jean Cocteau’s

Le Train Bleu for the Ballets Russes, Alexander Calder’s

delicate wire sculpture of Wills (1927), or Diego

Rivera’s monumental portrait of her as part of the

Allegory of California mural (1931) for the San Francisco

Stock Exchange (Guttmann quotes Rivera describing

Mills as ‘my ideal of the perfect type’ [Guttmann,

129]). In fact, by the time the latter two works were

produced, tennis was no longer even an Olympic sport,

having been dropped following the games of 1924.

This is not to say that the Olympic Games does not

have a history of strong visual imagery of its own, just

that, at least until the middle of the twentieth century

when the standard of Olympic poster design improves

markedly, it has usually been produced outside any

offi cial Olympic or arts and design context, primarily

by commercial photographers. A number of Albert

Meyer’s photographs of the 1896 Athens games are

reproduced by O’Mahony and analysed skilfully

alongside the reportage drawings of André Castaigne

and Corwin Knapp Linson. The photograph of Jesse

Owens standing on the top step of the podium in

1936 and saluting, while the runner-up, Germany’s

Luz Long, gives the fascist salute, is contextualized by

a picture of the pair lying next to each other smiling

for the camera and Owens’ recollections of their

friendship during the games. Another famous podium

photograph of US athletes Tommie Smith and John

Carlos giving a Black Power salute at the 1968 Mexico

games is also put into context by the accounts of the

International Olympic Committee’s condemnation of

the protest, the pair’s subsequent suspension from the

US team and the hostile reaction of the American press.

Such is the power of the imagery here and in the case

of the grainy newspaper photograph of a balaclava-


Reviews

wearing Black September terrorist on the balcony of

the Israeli team’s headquarters in the Munich Olympic

village that the discussions of two memorials to these

events (Rigo 23’s 2005 commemoration of Smith and

Carlos’ actions at San José State University and David E.

Davis’ David Berger National Memorial (1975/1980)

for the eleven Israeli victims in Cleveland, Ohio)

inevitably seem like codas to the international ructions

and anxieties provoked by the initial photographs.

Nevertheless, O’Mahony has produced a fascinating

cultural history of the Games, one that is alive to the

ways in which our reception of athletic achievement

has been mediated by imagery and the political, social,

race and gender messages that those images have

carried.

Guttmann adopts a clear approach to what he

describes as sport and art’s ‘sibling relationship within

the extended family of culture’ (1). Treating the subject

chronologically, each chapter has successive sections

dealing with American culture, its sport, its art and

fi nally its art that deals with sport. The sections on

art history and artists will contain few surprises to

those already acquainted with the history of American

painting since Benjamin West and are designed to

give the lay reader enough context to understand the

works of art discussed in the fi nal sections devoted to

the meeting of sport and art. Guttmann also chooses

to limit his account to painting and to terminate it

with Andy Warhol, meaning that, unlike O’Mahony’s

account, he does not deal with the popular imagery of

sport, or with more contemporary mixed media works,

which often draw on that imagery, such as the fl oating

basketballs of Jeff Koons’ ‘Equilibrium’ series (1985),

fi rst exhibited alongside Nike advertisements.

Guttmann’s early chapters plot the general puritan

attitude towards both sport and art that the Founding

Fathers instituted. Of course, this means that there is

relatively little work to discuss: West paints some well-

to-do young men with a cricket bat and horse-racing

scenes were common, but this serves to underscore

how little the American scene, both sporting and

artistic, differed from the British at this point. It is

only following the US civil war, when Americans take

to inventing their own sports at about the same time

that American artists start looking towards France for

inspiration, that his study really gathers momentum.

Even so, while baseball was being adapted from

cricket and rugby was adopted and almost instantly

transformed into American football, art took some

time to catch on to these developments. Winslow

Homer’s portrayals of guides in the Adirondacks,

hunters and fi shermen are at odds with the general

move, both in society and sport, towards codifi cation,

rationalization and recognition of the importance of

the urban. Although there are a few portrayals of games

of croquet, this was a game played largely for social

diversion and it is only with Thomas Eakins’ rowers

that art really begins to move once again in something

approaching the tandem that Guttmann claims.

The accounts of the rise of individual sports

are often fascinating; cricket enjoyed a surprising

popularity, especially around Philadelphia, well into

the nineteenth century, while basketball was invented

as a response to a challenge for an indoor sport to be

played during the winter. Its inventor, James Naismith,

called the game ‘a modern synthetic product of the

offi ce. The conditions of the game were recognized, the

requirements met, and the rules formulated … before

any attempt was made to test its value’ (Guttmann, 80).

Basketball is also one of the sports more frequently

depicted by artists, although exceeded by the number

of representations of baseball and boxing, the latter

mainly owing to George Bellows’ interest in the sport.

Guttmann covers Bellows’ boxing paintings well,

arguing that the move from the agitated brushstrokes

of early works, such as Both Members of this Club (1909), to

the more elegant touches of Ringside Seats (1924), parallels

the relocation of boxing from the fringe of legality

to ‘relatively sanitized social events that attracted

fi lm stars, politicians and other celebrities’ (168). By

comparison with these sports, there are remarkably

few representations of American football or ice hockey.

Guttmann’s study is at its most effective when dealing

with the period bookended by the works of Eakins and

Bellows. He can be dismissive of more contemporary

works, which is a curious stance since, as he points

out, they coincide with the years in which widespread

international interest in both American art and

American sports really emerged.

Erasmus Weddigen’s Cycling, Cubo-Futurism and the Fourth Dimension continues his work on Jean Metzinger

and his At the Cycle-Race Track, which was started by his

essay with Sonya Schmid, ‘Jean Metzinger and the

“Queen of the Classics”’.3 That work established not

only that Metzinger was painting the one-day classic

race Paris-Roubaix, but also that the collage fragment

visible between the chest and thigh of the rider referred

1 Jean Metzinger, At the Cycle-Race Track (Au Vélodrome), 1912. Oil, sand and collage on canvas, 130.4 × 97.1 cm. Venice: Peggy Guggenheim Collection. © Jean Metzinger/SIAE 2012.


Reviews


Reviews

to the victory in the race by Charles Crupelandt on

7 April 1912. As well as providing information to

date the picture, this also confi rmed the identity of

the rider. One hundred years on from Crupelandt’s

victory, At the Cycle-Race Track was the key work in the

exhibition at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, which

evidenced Weddigen’s dual concerns of cycling and the

importance of conceptions of the fourth dimension

to Metzinger and the group of artists alongside him.

The exhibition pursued these interests by assembling,

on the one hand, a collection of works with cycling as

a theme, including artists such as Umberto Boccioni,

Mario Sironi and Gino Severini and, on the other, a

group by artists interested in the fourth dimension,

such as Marcel Duchamp, or in volumetric practices,

such as the use of sand and pebbles in works by Georges

Braque and Louis Marcoussis. Bicycle advertisements,

press photographs and publicity material and even

a vintage racing bike from the time of Crupelandt’s

victory complemented the sporting pictures, the

bike forming part of a display which included the

modern machine of Swiss star Fabian Cancellara, who

is also interviewed in the catalogue. The exhibition

ended with visitors having the opportunity to try

the ‘Relativistic Bicycle’, which, when pedalled fast

enough, supposedly allows the rider to experience the

effect of travelling at near light speed via a projection

screen, neatly and playfully reuniting the twin

concerns inspired by Metzinger’s painting.

The catalogue’s major essay is the introductory

piece, again by Weddigen and Sonya Schmid-

Weddigen, which situates the painting within a broad

history of sporting works of art and the enthusiasm

for cycling. A useful analysis of the Puteaux cubists,

Metzinger’s role within the group, their relations

with the bande à Picasso and the Italian futurists follows,

leading to the somewhat awkward designation ‘cubo-

futurism’, a term that is generally only applied to the

works of Russian artists who, unlike Metzinger, were

using it at the time. Although At the Cycle-Race Track

undoubtedly mixes ideas drawn from cubism and

futurism, it is unclear whether this designation can be

extended to anyone else involved in the discussions at

Puteaux, or to artists such as Robert Delaunay, whose

work it appears to fi t equally well. One of the elements

that distinguishes the Puteaux group was their interest

in the fourth dimension and this central concern of

Metzinger’s is handled well. Duchamp, who took the

ideas surrounding the fourth dimension less seriously,

later recalled that the term was ‘a thing you talked

about, without knowing what it meant’ (quoted in

Wolfgang Dreschler’s essay ‘The mathematical and

physical dimensions’ in Weddigen, 38). The short

essays that follow bear witness to the diversity of the

concept, treating subjects as varied as astrophysics,

neuroscience and anthropology, before Weddigen-

Schmid provides an essay on the use of sand, the results

of an investigation of the materials and techniques used

for At the Cycle-Race Track are presented and Weddigen

details its relationship to two further oils of cyclists

by Metzinger, included in the exhibition, while also

giving further information on Paris-Roubaix in 1912.

Even after such an intense concentration on At the Cycle-Race Track, some intriguing questions remain.

Infra-red refl ectography of the second collage element

(reading ‘PNEUS’) establishes without much doubt

that this newspaper clipping is from 8 April 1912, as it

carries newsprint on its reverse that in all probability

refers to a tennis match that was to have been played

the following day. The fragment on the left refers

directly to Crupelandt’s victory under the black line at

its base, so must be from around the same date, but the

source publication or publications are still unknown, as

is whether Metzinger was working from a photograph

of Crupelandt racing. Weddigen believes that the two

smaller paintings of cyclists predate Crupelandt’s

victory, but that all three ‘must have been painted at

short intervals in 1912’ (Weddigen, 91). The dating of

At the Cycle-Race Track is crucial because if it is as early as

April 1912 then it precedes Picasso’s Still-Life with Chair Caning, datable to May of that year and generally taken

as the fi rst cubist collage. However, Metzinger’s collage

does not appear to have been exhibited before 1915

and while securely dated newspaper collage elements

obviously provide a date before which a work cannot

have been completed, they are no guarantee that it was

completed close to the publication of the newspaper;

Carlo Carrà’s collage Pursuit (1915) employs a fragment

of newspaper that is over six months old and Picasso

used newspaper from as far back as the 1880s in 1913,

as though to warn future art historians of the hazards

involved.4 Stylistically Metzinger’s use of collage,

which is confi ned to this single example, has more

in common with Juan Gris’ use of small elements

within a large oil composition, dating from the late

summer of 1912. In 1913 Metzinger wrote that collage

elements were ‘incidental and of little importance’.5

This attitude seems odd if Metzinger had preceded

Picasso in using collage, especially as Weddigen refers

to Metzinger’s ‘naïve egocentricity’, his ‘ambition’


Reviews

and ‘vanity’ (34), as well as his later antedating of

some works. Nevertheless, a date some time during

1912 appears likely, which would mean that, at the

very least, it was roughly contemporary not only with

Braque’s use of newspapers in the papiers-collés but also

with Robert Delaunay’s Cardiff Team (1912–13) and

Albert Gleizes’ The Football Players (1913), both exhibited

in 1913.

These three publications take differing approaches

to the study of sports and the visual: O’Mahony’s

book is a cultural history of a single international

organization, while Guttmann’s spans several centuries

and postulates a number of broad, but intriguing,

correspondences between art and sport in one

country. Weddigen’s sustained focus on a sole work

by Metzinger, on the other hand, allows a greater

understanding of the artist’s position within the art

world at this time. This diversity of methodology and

scope between three books appearing within a year of

one another signals not only that the fi eld is a growing

one, but also that there remains much more that could

be explored.

Notes1 Steven Connor, A Philosophy of Sport, London, 2011, 42.

2 F. T. Marinetti, ‘The new ethical religion of speed’, in Marinetti,

Critical Writings, ed. Günter Berghaus, trans. Doug Thompson, New

York, 2006, 255; Hannes Meyer, ‘The New World’, in Meyer, Bauten, Projekte und Schriften/ Building, Projects and Writings, ed. Claude Schnaidt,

trans. D. Q. Stephenson, London, 1965, 91.3 Sonya Schmid and Erasmus Weddigen, ‘Jean Metzinger und die

“Königin der Klassiker” Eine Cyclopädie des Kubismus’, Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch, Bund 59, 1998, 229–58.

4 On the dating of Pursuit, see Flavio Fergonzi, The Mattioli Collection: Masterpieces of the Italian Avant-Garde, Milan, 2003, 217–18. For Picasso’s use

of nineteenth-century newspapers, see Robert Rosenblum, ‘Picasso

and the coronation of Alexander III: A note on the dating of some Papiers Collés’, Burlington Magazine, 113: 823, October 1971, 604–8.

5 Jean Metzinger, ‘Kubistická Technika’, A Cubism Reader, eds Mark Antliff

and Patricia Leighten, trans. J. M. Todd et al., Chicago, IL and London,

2008, 611.

entering the field of play: new approaches to sport and art

Documents