Sport and modernism in the visual arts in Europe, <i>c</i>. 1909–39

Bernard Vere

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781784992507
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526126818
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Storia dell'arte moderna

This book highlights sport as one of the key inspirations for an international range of modernist artists. Sport emerged as a corollary of the industrial revolution and developed into a prominent facet of modernity as it spread across Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. It was celebrated by modernists both for its spectacle and for the suggestive ways in which society could be remodelled on dynamic, active and rational lines. Artists included sport themes in a wide variety of media and frequently referenced it in their own writings. Sport was also political, most notably under fascist and Soviet regimes, but also in democratic countries, and the works produced by modernists engage with various ideologies. This book provides new readings of aspects of a number of avant-garde movements, including Italian futurism, cubism, German expressionism, Le Corbusier's architecture, Soviet constructivism, Italian rationalism and the Bauhaus.

1
The man-machine: the modern sports of cycling and motor racing

In 1912–13, three famous works by avant-garde artists took cycle racing as their subject. The three works are: the American-born, German-based expressionist Lyonel Feininger's The Bicycle Race, 1912 (plate 1); the French cubist Jean Metzinger's At the Cycle-Race Track, 1912 (plate 2); and the Italian futurist Umberto Boccioni's Dynamism of a Cyclist, 1913 (plate 3). A fourth important painting of a cyclist, Natalia Goncharova's The Cyclist, 1913, does not deal with competitive cycling and so is considered in this chapter only for its portrayal of the movement of bicycle and rider. The geographic spread but near-contemporaneity of the production of the works raises a set of questions I hope to answer: Why should these artists, working across Europe and with different, often rival, artistic affiliations be drawn to the same subject matter? What was it about professional cycling in the years immediately preceding the Great War that lent itself to being painted? To what extent were the artists aware of and responding to the works of the others? Finally, what do the differences in the works tell us about the attitudes of the individual avant-gardes, both generally and in special relation to sport?

Lyonel Feininger and the early years of the bicycle

One of the odd things about the sudden slew of cycling paintings is that the bicycle was far from new. By 1912, the oldest professional road races dated back over twenty years and other artists such as the futurist Giacomo Balla and the cubist Robert Delaunay were painting the more modern automobiles and aeroplanes, respectively. Part of the reason for the cycling paintings might be personal. All three artists shared an enthusiasm for cycling that pre-dates their works. In the case of Boccioni, this took the form of drawings of bicycles submitted to the magazine of the Italian Touring Club from 1907.¹ But both Feininger and Metzinger were riders. Feininger owned a racing bike as far back as the 1890s. This was the era in which the bicycle was an expression of the Belle Epoque. As Eugen Weber puts it, cycling was ‘a pastime for the rich and idle’.² Feininger's bicycle would indeed have been expensive; Weber puts the cost of a machine at about three months' wages of a schoolteacher. Philippe Gaboriau calls the bicycle the ‘spearhead of upper-class values at the end of the nineteenth century’.³ Feininger himself remembered the aristocratic origins of the machines in his playful canvas The Velocipedists of 1910 (figure 1). According to the futurist painter Gino Severini, Metzinger participated in a track race at the Parc des Princes and Severini recalls that he ‘flaunted an elegance and the manners typical of the Parc des Princes socialite racetrack set’.⁴ Metzinger himself recalled cycling round the Vélodrome d'Hiver for one hundred kilometres without stopping, in order to win a bet with fellow artists Albert Gleizes and Jacques Villon.⁵

1 Lyonel Feininger, The Velocipedists, 1910

Riding on the track, as opposed to the road, retained elements of the Belle Epoque spirit well into the twentieth century. But Metzinger's own painting depicts the closing stages of a road race, and in doing so it acknowledges the fundamental shift in the character of bicycling between the 1890s and 1910, which saw the price of the machines reduce dramatically and the first professional road races, organised by newspapers in order to increase circulation, begin to attract mass audiences. Hugh Dauncy and Geoff Hare describe the inaugural Tour de France in 1903 as bringing together ‘in one event three burgeoning social phenomena: modern sport, mass circulation newspapers and modern advertising strategies’.⁶

The earliest of Feininger's works connected to the final painting of The Bicycle Race dates from 1908 and is an example of his cartoon illustration, executed the year after his comparatively late turn to oil painting. In Balance (figure 2), six riders are arranged in roughly the same composition that Feininger would employ four years later (the change of orientation from portrait to landscape eliminates one of the riders). Yet Balance, with its handlebar moustaches and discernible faces, is a work that is at least as connected to cycling's Belle Epoque as it is to modern sport. In The Bicycle Race, the riders become less individuated, even to the extent that three of them have caps of the same colour as their jerseys in place of Balance's free-flowing long hair. The geometric style is partly a result of Feininger's 1911 trip to Paris, where he became familiar with cubism. In a letter of March 1913, Feininger wrote that he was trying to portray the ‘rhythm and balance between various objects’, while stressing his distance from cubism, even reluctantly proposing the term ‘prism-ism’.⁷ In 1912, in a piece for the Parisian journal Les Tendences Nouvelles, tellingly illustrated by The Bicycle Race, Feininger set down his view that ‘every picture that deserves the name must be an absolute synthesis of rhythm, form, perspective and color; and even all that is not good enough if it is not expressive’.⁸ The synthesis that Feininger seeks is partly a result of the subject matter. The riders seem one with their machines, but just as importantly, the peloton or bunch seems to move as one. Whereas Balance had the riders looking at one another, in the painting the riders collectively seem to constitute a machine composed of triangles, so that even the spaces between the bikes appear to take on solid form, as in the case of the triangle between the legs of the rider to the rear. It is hard to establish unequivocally that Balance portrays club riders enjoying a day out on their bikes and possibly a competitive, but friendly, race or that The Bicycle Race references the altogether more stringent demands of professional sport, but the changes made between the works suggest that interpretation. There is a powerful story to be told of the social liberation, freedom of movement and enjoyment occasioned by the invention of bicycle, but this is not apparent in any of the three paintings I am discussing. If there remains at least a little doubt over whether the riders in The Bicycle Race are professionals that is not the case for At the Cycle-Race Track or Dynamism of a Cyclist, where the riders are certainly professional and, as Roger Caillois argues, for professional cyclists, competition ‘has ceased being a recreation intended as a relaxation from fatigue or a relief from the monotony of oppressive or exhausting work. It is their very work, necessary to their subsistence, a constant and absorbing activity, replete with obstacles and problems’.⁹ This fusion of professional man and precision machine resulted in two distinct portrayals of the riders: the first, common in the newspaper reports of the races, sees the riders as exemplary workers joined to what Gaboriau calls ‘machines which shatter distance, machines of play linked to speed’;¹⁰ the second views them as ‘forçats de la route’ (forced labourers of the road), a term occasionally used by the riders themselves, a charge which Gaboriau believes can be traced back at least as far as 1911 and which is accentuated by the fact that riders rode not for their country but for commercial concerns in races organised by the media. In fact, as Caillois observes, modern sports contests (and he specifically names bicycle races on his list) are ‘intrinsic spectacles … dramas whose vicissitudes keep the public breathless, and lead to denouements which exalt some and depress others. The nature of these spectacles remains that of an agôn, but their outward aspect is that of an exhibition’.¹¹

2 Lyonel Feininger, Balance, 1908, as published in Das Schnauferl

Jean Metzinger and Paris–Roubaix

Metzinger's painting is the only one of the three where both the race and the location of the spectacle can be firmly established. The hoarding visible between chest and thigh of the rider identifies the race as the one-day classic Paris–Roubaix, and the velodrome location means that this is the conclusion of the race in Roubaix. The race, first run in 1896, has become the quintessential one-day bicycle contest and has an exemplary history. Roubaix, now virtually a suburb of Lille, had an independent, successful identity at the turn of the century. By the time Metzinger came to paint At the Cycle-Race Track it had a population of 125,000, and in 1911 had played host to an international exhibition that had drawn three thousand exhibitors and 1.6 million visitors. The city's prosperity depended on its textile industry, so much so that it was known as a ‘French Manchester’ and the ‘city with a thousand chimneys’.¹² The race's approach to the city was similarly industrialised, home to the mini...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: why sport?
• 1 The man-machine: the modern sports of cycling and motor racing
• 2 Adversarial modernisms: the spectacle of boxing and the geometry of tennis
• 3 Oval balls and cubist players: French paintings of rugby
• 4 Of gods and men: the Olympic games and its rivals
• 5 The stadium has carried the day against the art museum
• Conclusion: body politics
• Select bibliography
• Index
• Color Plates