Edgar Degas The False Start 1869-1870 oil on canvas
(image source: tuttartpitturasculturapoesiamusica)
Today’s entertainment world is saturated with sport. Players are given celebrity status and games are often hyped up as ‘do or die’ affairs. Creating art work based on sporting themes is not an old idea, but many artists over the ages have depicted sport in authentic, documentarian and whimsical ways.
The 19th Century saw the awakening of modern art where many of its artists placed several contemporary subjects - including sport - into their creative sights. Edgar Degas (1834-1917) was a French Impressionist who’s inquisitiveness about nature - coupled with a thorough discipline in drawing and studio based practice - gave his work an edgy realism that often set him apart from many of his fellow Impressionists who generally worked plein air.
Degas’ series of paintings and drawings of horse racing at Longchamps reflected his high social status (he often wore a top hat) and he frequented events with Edouard Manet. His creative diligence saw him create countless works depicting the racing from various different angles, often featuring riders and horses in working poses, an artistic enquiry he often made with other subjects such as ballerinas and laundry workers. Degas’ galloping horses often appeared with an ungainly stance that made them resemble toy rocking horses, as if the artist’s observations were somehow made naively (see above image). This assumption should be placed into historical context because the correct motion of horses was only fully understood when high-speed photography was developed in the late 1800s, which revealed the true positioning of horse’s legs in full gallop.
L.S. Lowry The Football Match 1932 Limited addition print
(Image source: Andy Royston blog)
Sport on the other end of the social scale was a theme of English artist L.S. Lowry (1887-1976), famous for his depictions of working social life in the industrial north of England in the 1930s to 50s. Lowry’s simple drawings and paintings are rich in an honest observation and appreciation for his surroundings. Football has always been associated with working communities and Lowry’s pictures often contain an intimate spirit of local people set inside smoky industrial landscapes, as seen in the above image The Football Match. Lowry’s well known painting ‘Going to the Match’ captures the excitement and anticipation of a league match with Bolton Wanderers FC. The fans in the scene almost resemble factory workers on their way to work, something they would likely be doing every day during the week.
Pablo Picasso Footballer 1961 cut out sheet metal and oil paint
(image source: Clair en France)
L.S. Lowry wasn’t the only artist to take on football. Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) might be better known for his bull fighting sport scenes but he created a semi three dimensional maquette made from sheet metal titled Footballer which displays the effortless ease in which Picasso could take and transform ubiquitous every day materials to create a simple but whimsical character. It is unlikely that the player represents Real Madrid because Picasso never returned to Spain after General Franco seized power.
Georges Braque (1882-1963) was one of the exponents of the Cubist movement alongside Picasso, who created landscapes and interior scenes that challenged the perception of the picture plane and pictorial space. Braque made a series of interiors that featured a billiard table where, using cubist principles, he depicted an intimate room with an elongated and folded table with understated and harmonised colours.
Georges Braque The Billiard Table 1945 oil and sand on canvas
(Image source: tate.org)
IA couple of years’ back I created a small painting The New Season, which was based on an under-23 professional football match in Dagenham, East London on a late August evening. I was attracted to the intimacy of lower league football grounds, where spectators are much closer to the pitch and the small stands are adorned with advertising for local traders and businesses - a far contrast to the hyperbole of identi-kit super stadia of the Premier League with ‘anywhere’ branding.
The New Season 2017 acrylic on board 15 x 20 cm
Today’s society elevates professional sport to a level resembling cinema. It’s participants are famous actors in a fast and tense drama, often viewed through a slow motion lens, accompanied by pounding contemporary music, where winning is everything. The commodification of sport has created real life fictional characters placed inside a real life interactive ‘computer game’. The iconic image for most sport stars lasts only for a short time - something akin to Andy Warhol’s depictions of ubiquitous throw away culture rather than an actual heroism worthy of historical figures. For me, artists like Degas, Picasso and Lowry appreciated the nature of human activity, including sport, and is reflected in their art.