Sport and modernism in the visual arts in Europe, <i>c</i>. 1909–39 9781526126801

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SPORT AND MODERNISM IN THE VISUAL ARTS IN EUROPE, c. 1909–39

Bernard Vere

Sport and modernism in the visual arts in Europe, c. 1909–39

Sport and modernism in the visual arts in Europe, c. 1909–39

Bernard Vere

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Bernard Vere 2018 The right of Bernard Vere to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN  978 1 7849 9250 7  hardback First published 2018

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Typeset by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited

For Karina, Luca and Rosa

Contents

List of illustrations page viii Acknowledgements xii Introduction: why sport?

1

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

15

2 Adversarial modernisms: the spectacle of boxing and the geometry of tennis

46

3 Oval balls and cubist players: French paintings of rugby

85

4 Of gods and men: the Olympic games and its rivals

114

5 The stadium has carried the day against the art museum

143

Conclusion: body politics

176

Select bibliography

185

Index 195

Illustrations

Plates 1 Lyonel Feininger, The Bicycle Race, 1912. Oil on canvas (80 × 100 cm). National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. © DACS 2016. 2 Jean Metzinger, At the Cycle-Race Track, 1912. Oil on canvas (130 × 97 cm). Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York). © DACS 2016. 3 Umberto Boccioni, Dynamism of a Cyclist, 1913. Oil on canvas (70 × 95 cm). Mattioli Collection, Italy. 4 Henri Rousseau, The Football Players, 1908. Oil on canvas (100.3 × 80.3 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. 5 Robert Delaunay, The Cardiff Team, Third Version, 1912–13. Oil on canvas (326 × 207.8 cm). Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. 6 Albert Gleizes, The Football Players, 1912–13. Oil on canvas (226 × 183 cm). Alisa Mellon Bruce Fund, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2016. 7 André Lhote, Rugby, 1917. Oil on canvas (127.5 × 132.5 cm). Pompidou Centre, Paris. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2016. Photograph © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Jean-François Tomasian. 8 Varvara Stepanova, Designs for sports clothing, 1923. © Rodchenko & Stepanova Archive, DACS, RAO 2016. 9 Gustav Klucis, Contact sheet of designs for nine postcards for the Spartakiada, 1928. Lithograph (48.1 × 36.7 cm). Latvian National Museum of Art. 10 Gustav Klucis, Design for a postcard for the Spartakiada (Discus thrower), 1928. Cut-and-pasted photographs, paper and gouache on paper. Latvian National Museum of Art. 11 El Lissitzky, Axonometric drawing of the yacht club of the International Red Stadium on the Lenin Hills, 1925. Indian ink, gouache, graphite (38.2 × 45.7 cm). State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow. 12 El Lissitzky, illustration for 6 Tales with Easy Endings, 1921–22. Photocollage, pencil, gouache, ink on cardboard (33 × 24.3 cm). State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow. 13 El Lissitzky, Ground plan of International Red Stadium, Lenin Hills, 1925. Collage, red pencil, white paint on blue paper (50.7 × 86.2 cm). State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow. viii

Illustrations

Figures 1 Lyonel Feininger, The Velocipedists, 1910. Oil on canvas (96 × 84.5 cm). Sotheby’s Impressionism and Modern Art Evening Sale, London, 20 June 2005, Lot 20. © DACS 2016. Photograph courtesy of Sotheby’s. 16 2 Lyonel Feininger, Balance, 1908, as published in Das Schnauferl. © DACS 2016. 18 3 F. T. Marinetti in his Fiat car, 1908. 30 4 Vincenzo Lancia and his mechanic in his Fiat racing car at the 1907 Targa Florio. 31 5 Luigi Russolo, Dynamism of an Automobile, 1912. Oil on canvas (104 × 140 cm). Pompidou Centre, Paris. Photograph © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Jacqueline Hyde. 34 6 Ernst Mach, Photograph showing a speeding bullet, 1887. Photograph courtesy of Wired.com. 35 7 Le Corbusier, ‘In Search of a Standard’, Toward an Architecture, 1924. Reproduced by permission of Fondation Le Corbusier. 36 8 Werner Graeff, ‘Most German Cars Have Pointed Radiators: You are partly to blame!’, G, no. 3 (June 1924). © Museum Wiesbaden. 39 9 Georges Braque in boxing gloves and trunks, c. 1911. 48 10 William Roberts, Boxers, 1914. Pencil, pen and ink, and collage (60.5 × 53.5 cm). Private collection. Estate of John David Roberts. By permission of the Treasury Solicitor. Photograph courtesy of Sotheby’s. 50 11 Carlo Carrà, Boxer, 1913. Charcoal, ink and pencil on paper (44 × 28 cm). © DACS 2016. Photograph © Estorick Collection, London, UK / Bridgeman Images. 51 12 Photograph of Jack Johnson from The Soil, number 2, 1917. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Thomas J. Watson Library (Rogers Fund, 1917). Photograph by Paul Thompson. 53 13 Arthur Cravan in training in Barcelona, 1916. 54 14 Arthur Cravan photographed c. 1914 and published in The Soil, number 4, 1917. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Thomas J. Watson Library (Rogers Fund, 1917). 59 15 The Johnson–Cravan fight in Barcelona, 1916. Published in The Soil, number 4, 1917. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Thomas J. Watson Library (Rogers Fund, 1917). 60 16 Photograph from Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning, 1925. Reproduced by permission of Fondation Le Corbusier. 63 17 Paul Nash, Come Out to Live. Poster for London Underground, 1936. © TfL from the London Transport Museum collection. 67 18 Adolf Behne, Illustration from Eine Stunde Architektur, 1928. Courtesy of Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library. 68 19 Illustration from Sigfried Giedion, Befreites Wohnen, 1929. Courtesy of Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library. 71 20 Suzanne Lenglen v. Helen Wills, Cannes, 1926. 73 21 Y.W.C.A. photograph, ‘Proper and Improper Way to Dress’, reproduced in Literary Digest, 14 May 1922. 74 ix

Illustrations

22 Illustration from James Laver, ‘Clothing – And Design’, in Design in Modern Life, ed. John Gloag, 1934. 23 Illustration to Amédée Ozenfant, Foundations of Modern Art, 1931. 24 Hermès advertisement included Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, 1925. Reproduced by permission of Fondation Le Corbusier. 25 Clipping from La Vie au Grand Air, 18 January 1913, showing a rugby match between Stade Toulousain and SCUF, with hand-drawn additions by Robert Delaunay. 26 Robert Delaunay, The Cardiff Team, First Version, 1912–13. Oil on canvas (195.6 × 132 cm). Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. 27 André Lhote, Les Footballeurs, c. 1918. Oil on canvas (59.7 × 81.3 cm). Sold at Sotheby’s New York, 12 May 1999, lot 324. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2016. 28 André Lhote, Football, 1920. Oil on canvas (148 × 179 cm). Sold at Sotheby’s New York, 3 May 2011, lot 50. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2016. 29 Charles Coubertin, Allegory of Sport, 1896. Oil on canvas (97.5 × 80 cm). Olympic Museum, Lausanne / Google Art Project. 30 Still from Olympia (1938), directed by Leni Riefenstahl. 31 László Moholy-Nagy, Sport Makes Appetite, 1927. Gelatin silver print of a photomontage (18.1 × 24 cm). J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. © Estate of László Moholy-Nagy / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 32 László Moholy-Nagy, Photographic illustration of hurdlers, From Material to Architecture. © Estate of László Moholy-Nagy / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 33 Bruno Munari, advertisement for Olimpiadi, 1936. Lithograph (60 × 80 cm). Massimo & Sonia Cirulli Archive, New York. © 1963 Bruno Munari – All rights reserved to Maurizio Corraini s.r.l. Image © 2017 Fondazione Massimo e Sonia Cirulli, San Lazzaro di Savena – Bologna. 34 Gustav Klucis, Sport, 1922. Photomontage. Whereabouts unknown. 35 Aleksandr Rodchenko, Dynamo Stadium. Sports Parade, 1932. Gelatin silver print (24 × 30 cm). © Rodchenko & Stepanova Archive, DACS, RAO 2016. 36 Aleksandr Rodchenko, Dynamo Stadium. Grandstand, 1932. Gelatin silver print (30 × 24 cm). © Rodchenko & Stepanova Archive, DACS, RAO 2016. 37 Umbo (Otto Umbehr), Portrait of Hans Meyer at the Drawing Board, c. 1925. Gelatin silver print (11.9 × 16.6 cm). Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin. © DACS 2016. 38 Hannes Meyer, Detail of an organogram of the Bauhaus, 1930. Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin. 39 T. Lux Feininger, Sport at the Bauhaus, 1927. Gelatin silver print (23.7 × 17.9 cm). Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin. © Estate of T. Lux Feininger. 40 Hajo Rose, High Jumper in front of the Prellerhaus, 1930. Gelatin silver print (36.8 × 31.2 cm). Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin. © DACS 2016. 41 Tony Garnier’s Stade Gerland illustrated in Sigfried Giedion, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Concrete, 1928. 42 El Lissitzky, Record (Runner), c. 1925. Photocollage (12 × 21.4 cm). Galerie Berinson, Berlin.

x

75 76 78 91 92 105 107 115 117 123 124

127 131 135 136 145 146 147 148 151 156

Illustrations

43 El Lissitzky, Footballer, c. 1925. Gelatin silver print (13.3 × 10.7 cm). Alexander Kaplan, New York. 44 El Lissitzky, Record, c. 1926. Gelatin silver print (26.7 × 22.4 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther. Acc. no.: 1766.2001. © 2017. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence. 45 Kiosks at the International Red Stadium site, designed by Turkus at Nikolai Ladovksy’s studio c. 1925. 46 Gino Barsotti, photograph of Pier Luigi Nervi’s Stadio Communale Giovanni Berta, Florence, 1932. RIBA, London. 47 Gino Barsotti, photograph of Pier Luigi Nervi’s Stadio Communale Giovanni Berta, Florence, 1932. RIBA, London. 48 Stadio Mussolini postcard, n.d. Museo d’Arte Urbana, Torino. 49 Logo for the Helsinki Olympic Games in 1952, showing the tower of the Olympic Stadium designed by Yrjö Lindegren and Toivo Jäntti and completed in 1938. Courtesy of the International Olympic Committee. 50 Banfi, Belgiojoso, Peressutti and Rogers, Motor racing room, National Exhibition of Sport, Milan, 1935. University of Turin Architecture Library. 51 Mario Sironi, ‘Greatest championship victories’ room, National Exhibition of Sport, Milan, 1935. University of Turin Architecture Library. © DACS 2016.

157

159 162 164 165 166 170 181 182

Every effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyright material, and the publisher will be pleased to be informed of any errors and omissions for correction in future editions.

xi

Acknowledgements

Material from this book has benefitted from being presented at various conferences: sections of the text on boxing were presented at ‘Playtime: The Cultures of Play, Gaming and Sport’, organised by Steven Connor, Ricarda Vidal and Louise Hojer in 2005. A paper on cycling was given at ‘The Visual in Sport’, organised by Mike Huggins and Mike O’Mahony in 2009. It subsequently formed part of the volume The Visual in Sport, which in turn was a special double issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport. Italian football stadiums were the subject of a talk delivered at ‘Modernism Now’, organised by the British Association of Modernist Studies in 2014. In the same year, Sarah Cheang and Meaghan Clarke organised a panel, ‘Fashionability: Fashion, Art, Culture’ at the Association of Art Historians’ (AAH) Annual Conference at which I spoke on tennis and architecture. Christina Bradstreet invited me to make French rugby the topic of one of the AAH’s ‘Art History in the Pub’ sessions. Robert Harbison of London Metropolitan University took a gamble when he agreed to me developing a course ‘Mass Spectacle, Mass Media, Art and Architecture’ as part of the MA in Architectural History, Theory and Interpretation in 2006. I’m very grateful that he did so. My thanks to everyone who listened, responded and participated in these presentations. Towards the end of the writing process, my institution, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London, granted me a period of research leave, which was an immense help. In addition to those named above, I would also like to thank Chris Adams, Mark Antliff, Anastasia Belyaeva, Iria Candela, Dennis Duncan, John Fagg, Allen Guttmann, Jos Hackforth-Jones, Dick Humphreys, Chantal Kleinmeulman, Deborah Longworth, Bristol Marriot, Mark Morris, Pat Simpson, Andrew Thacker, Sarah Victoria Turner, Marcus Verhagen, and Erasmus Weddigen. Special thanks to the team at Manchester University Press and to Laurie Michel-Hutteau, who took my rudimentary French translations and turned them into something more accurate. Unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own and here, as elsewhere, I am responsible for any mistakes. xii

Acknowledgements

Many of the book’s arguments arose from time thinking while swimming in the pool at the University of London Union and no series of acknowledgements for this project would be complete without recognising the two football teams for which I played during its conception and writing: The Jokers of the Thames League Division Two (and occasionally One) and the London Health and Safety Executive. Finally, although my list of those thanked is considerable, the majority of my thanks go to my wife, Karina, who has supported, cajoled, encouraged and facilitated my work in a way that perhaps only footballing managerial great Brian Clough could equal. And I’m not in love with him.

xiii

Introduction: why sport?

In 1927 Theo van Doesburg followed the English poet Sidney Hunt in terming ‘the international innovation attempts in the arts and architecture “the art-sports of Europe” ’, going on to claim that: ‘Life, technique commerce, the arts, architecture – all have become one big match. Nobody, not even the most conservative, can escape this acceleration, for it manifests itself everywhere, tangibly, audibly, visibly.’1 Three years earlier Hans Richter had dismissed László Moholy-Nagy as ‘that sprinter’, while even before this, in 1916, F. T. Marinetti had asserted that ‘sportsmen are the first neophytes’ of the futurist ‘Ethical Religion of Speed’. Two years previously, in a manifesto co-authored with C. R. W. Nevinson, Marinetti had desired ‘that sport be considered as an essential element in art’.2 A Dutchman quoting an Englishman, a German insulting a Hungarian, and an Italian who spent much of his time travelling around Europe promoting the futurist movement, recruiting another Englishman in the process; the list of those thinking about sport as analogous to art, or as an example for it, is far from limited to these six figures, as will be seen below, but their geographical spread indicates that we are dealing with a phenomenon that might be more pervasive than has hitherto been acknowledged. But what type of sport? Firstly, this book is concerned with competitive sport, which is to say, not with games or pastimes, or exercise carried out for its own sake, whether individually or collectively. It is not my purpose to define what is, or is not, a sport, but my main examples – competitive cycling, motorracing, tennis, boxing, soccer, rugby and athletics – would all conform to any plausible definition that has been or could be advanced.3 These sports, as with almost all others, were invented, codified or radically altered in the latter part of the nineteenth century. For the first pair of sports, this is self-explanatory, as one cannot race a car or a bicycle before they are invented. Boxing and athletics, on the other hand, had both been performed in recognisable forms for centuries. However, boxing’s adoption of the Marquess of Queensbury rules, written in 1867, imposed gloves, standardised lengths for rounds and introduced the count 1

Sport and modernism in the visual arts in Europe

of ten to determine the victor by knockout. This, along with the adoption of different weight classes, ushered in a much more regulated sport. The establishment of the British Amateur Athletics Association in 1880 and, even more significantly, the modern Olympic games, first held in Athens in 1896, also meant that athletics was regulated in a way that it had not been previously and international competition was promoted. Although tennis, soccer and rugby all had identifiable precursors these were far remote from the sports that emerged following the first Wimbledon tournament in 1877, the establishment of the Football Association in 1863 and the Rugby Football Union in 1871. Associations such as these led to the development of standardised rules and laws, the establishment of major competitions, and the construction of specialised venues to cater for a watching public. As these sports spread around Europe and further afield, international competition also became commonplace. Much has changed in sport over the past hundred years, but the sports that are played today are easily recognisable as those played in the in the period covered by this book, with many of them retaining the same governing bodies. Secondly, the book is primarily concerned with elite sport, that is, sport as carried out at or near the highest level of the time, whether or not its practitioners were amateurs or professionals (and indeed whether or not they themselves were part of a social elite). This is not to say, of course, that non-elite sport is not of interest. However, one of the features of elite sport is that it attracts a crowd. This audience also increased dramatically in the last years of the nineteenth century and early years of the twentieth, as the sports I discuss consolidated their popularity. When Italy played its first soccer international in 1910 a crowd of four thousand turned out to watch.4 This is not big by today’s standards, but was large compared to contemporary rival attractions. The following year saw the country’s first soccer stadium open, with a capacity of twenty-five thousand. When Italy won the World Cup in 1934, the attendance was fifty thousand. In what follows, I will place artists amongst those who attended sporting events: Moholy-Nagy briefly watched the 1936 Olympics, Amédée Ozenfant and Marinetti were spectators at automobile races, Pablo Picasso was in the crowd at both boxing and bull rings. Alongside rising attendances, other indicators testify to the mass appeal of elite sport. It was reported on extensively, both in the general press and in specialist sporting publications. Some of the works I discuss, most notably those by Jean Metzinger and Robert Delaunay, take this mediated experience of sport as their inspiration, even, in Metzinger’s case, literally incorporating it into the work. This coverage was further augmented by cinema newsreel and, later, radio broadcast. This in turn led to more people playing sport as well as watching it. Artists also participated. Metzinger and Lyonel Feininger cycled, Le Corbusier played basketball, Georges Braque boxed. So too, at a higher level, did the self-styled ‘poet and boxer’ Arthur Cravan, at one time the amateur light-heavyweight champion of France. This rise of sport took place as a corollary of industrial modernity. Initially what one did when one was not working, sport flourished in urban areas with 2

Introduction

the introduction of half or full day’s holiday and limits to the working day. Individual sports were dependent on these for their establishment as viable spectator sports. If the participants were not necessarily being paid, with sports such as rugby and tennis having at least notionally strict amateur codes, then they were definitely working in the sense of expending effort. But people were making money from this endeavour. A whole range of reporters and photographers owed their professional existence and livelihood to sport, while advertising was a prominent feature at many commercial sports venues. In some sports, such as cycling and motor racing, manufacturers sponsored the teams that competed. Sport became an early example of that oxymoronic sector, the leisure industry. Perhaps it is not surprising also that many soccer teams had their origins in industrial concerns. Arsenal, formerly Woolwich Arsenal, of London was a munitions factory team, while Thames Ironworks are now better known as West Ham United. In Italy, Juventus of Turin effectively became the side of the automotive giant Fiat, while Piero Pirelli of the rubber business was one of the founders of AC Milan and its president from 1908–29. In the Netherlands PSV Eindhoven, founded in 1913, remained the club of electronics company Philips for most of the remaining period covered by the book. Encouraged by what they perceived as the health benefits and team spirit inculcated by sport many employers facilitated its practice, whether in terms of providing space and equipment or by making time available. A survey carried out in 1935 found that eighty of eighty-five French factories had their own sports facilities.5 As I will discuss, many architects after the First World War turned to stadium design. The famous Van Nelle factory by Brinkman and Van der Vlugt included soccer pitches and tennis courts in its grounds. The same partnership designed the soccer stadium for Feyenoord Rotterdam, a project that garnered sufficient attention to be included in Circle: An International Survey of Constructive Art, edited by Naum Gabo, Leslie Martin and Ben Nicholson.6 The supposedly uplifting aspects of sports were also promoted in educational establishments. English public (i.e. private) schools had provided a nineteenth-century model for integrating sport into education, one that inspired Baron Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the Olympic games, amongst others. The common perception of this educational role for sport has been that it exemplified a form of muscular Christianity, as well as having the dual military benefits of fostering an esprit de corps and producing a trained, physically fit male body. Certainly these considerations played a part in the Baron’s enthusiastic promotion of sport in France. In England, positions hardened at the University of Oxford during the 1920s, where the aesthete ‘arties’ of the W. H. Auden generation (including Stephen Spender, Christopher Isherwood and Isaiah Berlin) defined themselves against the rugby-playing ‘hearties’, enshrining an opposition between intellectual and physical effort. In Europe, this opposition was far less obviously the case. One of only five teams to enter the second French Rugby Union championships in 1892–93 was a side from the Académie Julian, the art school that Henri Matisse had recently left. There is no suggestion that Matisse had any particular interest in the sport, but this was not the case with the group around 3

Sport and modernism in the visual arts in Europe

the journal Nouvelle Revue Française. In 1913, the journal’s editorial secretary and sometime cubist critic Jacques Rivière and the writer Alain-Fournier formed the rugby team Club Sportif de la Jeunesse Littéraire.7 Once the Bauhaus moved to Dessau it also put sport at the centre of activities. As the twentieth century progressed some aspects of professional sport began to resemble Taylorist and Fordist industrial principles; more and more attention was paid to the documentation of results. Timings became increasingly accurate and league tables demonstrated achievements (or lack of them) by a statistical analysis. In soccer, relegation was the penalty for poor performance, promotion and trophies the reward for those achieving the best results.8 For the very best, records established new benchmarks for human achievement. Marinetti praised ‘the concept and love of achieving “records” ’, his use of inverted commas around the English word also signalling that this was something new.9 Such an obsession was reliant on the existence of highly calibrated technology that could establish what that record was without equivocation. As Mandell observes: ‘The sports record presupposes a keen appreciation of a measurable accomplishment and, necessarily, precise measurements of time and space.’10 Technology played its part in other ways too. Fast steamship travel and, later, aeroplanes facilitated international competition. Wireless telegraphy and the telephone permitted results and reports of sports events to be communicated rapidly. Photography and cinema newsreel provided a visual record. By virtue of its popularity, sport also cropped up in some initially surprising places. It was a subject of music hall revue and sportsmen (and, more rarely, sportswomen) appeared on the stage, either as themselves or playing a role, albeit usually a thinly disguised one. With this level of publicity, elite sport’s practitioners, such as the boxer Jack Johnson or the tennis player Suzanne Lenglen, became celebrities, their images promulgated all over Europe and beyond. As Siegfried Kracauer wrote in relation to the nexus between photography, sport and fame: ‘Sometimes it is the fraction of a second required for the exposure of an object that determines whether or not a sportsman will become famous to the point where illustrated magazines commission photographers to give him exposure.’11 With contests not only watched by a crowd, but followed by a wider public reading articles, sitting in the cinema or listening to the wireless, with people increasingly playing sports themselves, and with its leading exponents becoming stars, sport has legitimate claims to be the most pervasive cultural form of the early twentieth century. According to Steven Connor, ‘mass spectator sport was one of the most salient and defining features of urban modernity … what we now mean by sport was the invention of the twentieth century, and, reciprocally, sport was one of the most distinctive ways in which the modernity of the twentieth century was produced’.12 If that is the case, we would expect to find that feature portrayed, discussed and incorporated in the works and writings of modern artists or architects, especially those where the question of a relation to urban modernity was central to their practice. As hinted at by the names I have listed thus far, we would not be disappointed. Yet few books have pointed 4

Introduction

out this link and none has treated the subject internationally and with a specific focus on the modern period. There was a contemporary awareness that the lure of sport had consequences for the arts. As I discuss in the fifth chapter, Hannes Meyer was the Bauhaus director who did most to promote sport there. Shortly before assuming his post, he wrote that ‘the stadium has carried the day against the art museum’. In the mid-1920s, Meyer was just one among many Germanic figures who sensed that the existence of the sporting crowd could serve as a model or a constituency for the arts. Speaking of his ‘Total Theater’, Walter Gropius, Meyer’s predecessor as director, asserted that the primary form of the stage was ‘the central arena on which the play unfolds itself three-dimensionally while the spectators crowd around concentrically. Today we know this form only as a circus, a bull ring, or a sports arena.’13 Bertolt Brecht, in his ‘Emphasis on Sport’, opened: We pin our hopes to the sporting public. Make no bones about it, we have our eyes on those huge concrete pans, filled with 15,000 men and women of every variety of class and physiognomy, the fairest and shrewdest audience in the world. There you will find 15,000 persons paying high prices, and working things out on the basis of a sensible weighting of supply and demand.14

In the visual arts, G. F. Hartlaub pressed the claims of advertising art as the only art, along with modern architecture, capable of reaching those in the stadium: Aside from modern functional architecture, advertising art is today the one true public art. It alone – as graphics, as mass reproduced printed type and images – reaches the nameless urban masses, whose enthusiasm no longer belongs to the church or to municipal authorities but rather to sports, fashion, and especially such ‘enterprises’ as football, boxing matches and bicycle races. This select cross section of the secular population, the big, broad ‘public’, is much more at home with these spectacles than in the galleries, expositions and high-mindedly artistic theatres.15

These four quotes were either written in or refer to projects spanning just three years, 1926–28. All make the claim that traditional high art has lost touch with its public. All oppose the sport venue to the theatre or the art gallery as they now exist, and all therefore ally modernist architecture to sport, Hartlaub by his pairing of functional architecture with advertising art, Brecht by his invocation of ‘concrete pans’ and Meyer and Gropius by virtue of their profession. Sports are not all equivalent to one another, of course. The sports I examine have a range of different venues, were played and watched by a different mix of classes, are financed in different ways and were covered from different angles by the media of the day. Different countries and different regions favoured one or the other sport. Cultural responses to them are even more open, overdetermined as they are by the interests, associations and affiliations of both individual artists and groupings. Sports history as an entity dates back to the 1960s, but since the early 5

Sport and modernism in the visual arts in Europe

1980s, when Richard Holt’s Sport and Society in Modern France appeared, Mandell published his Sport: A Cultural History and the International Journal of the History of Sport was founded, there has been a notable and welcome increase in interest in the cultural history of sport. Lengthy and high-quality books on individual sports such as tennis and boxing have appeared with ‘A Cultural History’ as a subtitle, while equally good books have appeared on individual sports in individual countries, such as rugby in France, soccer and cycling in Italy or the still more specialist soccer under Italian fascism.16 These are just a few examples, and the reader will find many more references to similar works in what follows, as my analyses are in many cases dependent on this type of approach. Being confined to the visual arts and a relatively short thirty-year period, one aspect of this book is a similar microhistorical examination of the response to specific sports at specific conjunctures. Nevertheless, these, taken together, range across different sports as well as different countries, in line with Pierre Bourdieu’s claim that ‘a particular sport cannot be analyzed independently of the totality of sporting practices’.17 Sport’s popularisation across Europe meant that many countries underwent broadly congruent experiences. It is not coincidental that the word for sport in almost all European languages is ‘sport’ or ‘sports’, or that soccer is called ‘football’, or some close variant, in all countries with the exception of Italy, where the word calcio was adopted to suggest an autarchic development of the sport, calcio being an old Florentine ball game.18 It is no surprise either, that Italy and Germany, with their relatively high levels of industrialisation, emerged as France’s principal challengers in motor sport, or that Italy inaugurated its own response to the Tour de France, the Giro d’Italia, six years after the first French race of 1903. As both these countries came under the control of fascist dictatorships, sport played an important part in the ideology promulgated by the regimes. This was perhaps more marked in Italy, where Mussolini’s government promoted the building of new stadiums, made sport an integral part of the Opera Nazionale Balilla youth groups and sponsored a National Exhibition of Sport in 1935 featuring designs by the rationalist architect Giuseppe Terragni and the artist Mario Sironi, amongst others.19 In the new Soviet Union, sport was put to similar overt propaganda purposes and these also involved artists and designers. El Lissitzky, working with Nikolai Ladovsky and his architecture students at the VKhUTEMAS, was prominent in the plans for an International Red Stadium to be built in the Lenin Hills above Moscow. Aleksandr Rodchenko’s photographs documented the Dynamo sports club, of which he was a member and which was the de facto club of the Ministry of the Interior, in its new modernist stadium.20 Gustav Klucis produced the publicity designs for the Spartakiada of 1928, an event consciously conceived as the remodelling of the Olympics along revolutionary lines, established by the Comintern agency Red Sports International. Although individual authorities might have promoted one sport above another and an individual sport’s popularity might have varied from country to country, it is clear that we are dealing with a phenomenon that is wide enough to constitute a field of study while not seeking to ignore the overdetermined 6

Introduction

circumstances of its treatment in individual cases, or the responses to sport on the part of artists. It has become possible to identify two major currents in these cultural responses: the first, most prevalent immediately before and in the early stages of the First World War, sees sport as part of what Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik, writing of Delaunay’s Cardiff Team, call ‘fairground modernity’.21 Sport is part of the spectacle of modern life, something that jostles up against a myriad of other endeavours (pioneering aviation and polar exploration being amongst the closest prominent analogues). Beyond its immediate performance, it can then be the subject of further entertainments (primarily music hall, newspapers and newsreels) and occasionally overlaps with these. Contests were engineered by newspapers, fights were promoted on the basis of profits to be made through their newsreel distribution, competitors appeared on the stage. This is very much the way that sport appears in the early collages of Picasso, where headlines dealing with sport and physical exercise feature prominently.22 Marinetti listed Japanese athletes and black boxers as amongst the attractions one could see at the music hall.23 Cravan’s fight against heavyweight champion Johnson was a logical, if extreme, outcome of this blending of sport and show business. As I discuss in chapter two, Johnson was no stranger to music hall, having appeared in staged fights in Paris and written and starred in a review, ‘Seconds Out’, in London. It is here that the boundaries between different areas of fairground modernity become extraordinarily blurred. The second current of cultural response to sport occurs in the aftermath of the First World War and lasts for longer. Sport becomes one way of thinking about rationalisation, a topic of central concern to artists, architects and designers. Whether it is Meyer instituting athletics training at the Bauhaus, Werner Graeff or Ozenfant writing about car design, Varvara Stepanova thinking about sports clothing in the Soviet Union or El Lissitzky, Klucis and Rodchenko photomontaging and photographing athletes and swimmers, reactions to sport put less stress on its entertainment value, or think about it significantly as aligned with other forms of entertainment. Instead its capacity to discipline and train the body, its lessons for rational design, its innovation and its ability to draw crowds and enervate them are all of interest, especially to Western and Soviet constructivists. Of course, to identify different responses is not to make them absolutes; both sport and art are too complex to be circumscribed by such attempts to draw overly prescriptive boundaries. These currents also co-existed with more conservative views of the relationship between art and sport, such as those of de Coubertin, whose Olympic games wished to honour achievement in the arts as well as achievement in sport, as the ancient games had done, and the rugby paintings of André Lhote that I discuss in chapter three. Most of my examples are drawn from more-or-less canonical names in histories of visual modernism, and certainly from countries (primarily France, Germany, Italy and the USSR) long held to be centres of modernist activity in painting, film, photography and architecture. This is not to suggest that links between 7

Sport and modernism in the visual arts in Europe

sport and the visual arts are less strong elsewhere, or less deserving of attention. The situation in Britain in particular would warrant further examination, since many modern sports originated there.24 My choices have been conditioned by the relative neglect of visual art that deals with sport, both amongst sports historians and art historians. In 1984, Mandell wrote that: ‘Even now, however, as this is written, it would be difficult to assemble an exhibition of first-rate modern painting, graphics, or sculpture all dealing with sport.’25 Just over a decade later, Peter Kühnst’s compendious Sports: A Cultural History in the Mirror of Art proved Mandell wrong.26 Running to over four hundred pages, Kühnst included many of the same works that I discuss in detail here. However, in a sort of visual equivalent to the bird’s-eye view of sport and culture that Mandell and Allen Guttmann produced, Kühnst also traced the relationship between sport and art back to the Renaissance and included leisure activities such as ballooning and recreational skiing. My own project is more narrow, both in chronological terms and in the sort of activity I wish to study. Given the surprising lack of critical material on the relationship between the visual arts and sport in general, and in order to establish the point that sport was an activity that, like the music hall, fashion or scientific advance, was integral to modernity and, like them, was an aspect of everyday life that captured the imagination of at least some modern artists, it was necessary to choose studies that could not easily be dismissed as marginal or irrelevant. In addition, Kühnst apart, much of the existing writing on sport and modernism had confined itself to a single country.27 It seemed to me that a study that emphasises the multi-national range of responses to sport both acts as a guarantee of the theme’s importance and allows the different approaches towards it to emerge. International competition is something that is common to both elite sport and, very often, avant-garde thought. That said, many of my chapters discuss the works of French artists and architects. This is not because French sport was embedded especially strongly in French culture. Britain, again, had larger crowds for most events, a more established sporting press and a greater history in major sports. In the modern sports of cycling and motor racing, with their links to industry, however, France could justifiably claim to be the world leader before the First World War. Sport in France is interesting not because it was firmly established, but precisely because it was a source for debate. In the wake of the defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1871, sport was mobilised as an ideological force in French life. As we will see, these debates were not lost on artists of the period, who often had their own perceptions of the French nation and what direction it should take, both politically and culturally. As this should demonstrate, the overt linking of sport and political ideology by both fascist and communist regimes should not obscure the fact that sport was never totally divorced from ideological concerns in democratic societies. There remains more, much more, to sport than its reduction to an instrumental tool of totalitarian thought, an important aspect though this is in the period I am discussing. Particularly in the inter-war period, this mixture of sport facilities as integral to new conceptions of urban planning, emphasis on training the body, 8

Introduction

the affinity with industry and a concept of spectacle established even before the First World War made it a topic of concern to artists and thinkers throughout Europe, with production ranging across film, design, photography, photomontage and architecture. The ideological uses to which sport was put by totalitarian regimes were also often not antithetical but in convergence with the interests of members of the avant-garde, an instance of the traversal of the ‘porous membrane separating cultural and political modernism, whether of the right or the left’, to use the words of Roger Griffin.28 Nor should it be forgotten that I am primarily concerned with representations of sport and its associated ideologies, rather than social documentary. The implementation of those ideologies, even in situations where one might suppose a receptive populace, was not straightforward. According to André Gounot, the soccer players of the French Fédération Sportive du Travail – affiliated to the Red Sport International – indulged in ‘extensive drinking bouts and made a name for themselves for their singing of offensive songs rather than for their renditions of the classic repertoire of revolutionary anthems’.29 Sport could also be an occasion for dissent. Robert Edelman writes of the support for soccer team Spartak Moscow that: ‘Hatred of the structures of force was central to the fans’ preference for Spartak.’30 Even before General Franco took power, FC Barcelona had become a focus for Catalan nationalism and dissent directed towards Madrid.31 Sport can be as anti-authoritarian as administered. In recent years there has been a welcome focus on cultural readings of women in sport, primarily as practitioners and spectators.32 It is certainly true that women cycled, boxed, played soccer and competed in the Olympics from 1928 and in the separate Women’s Olympic games from 1922. However, these activities remained largely marginalised by both the mainstream and sporting press. Few ideologies explicitly promoted competitive sport (as opposed to physical exercise and bodily training) for women. For this reason, my discussions of women’s sport tend to be concentrated on tennis, where the women’s game was the subject of great media attention, and the USSR, which was unusual in promoting competitive sport for women as part of its broader fizkultura, or physical culture, programme. Women as spectators were the subject of little comment, except at the boxing ring, where debates centred on the suitability for female eyes of the spectacle of men stripped to the waist hitting one another. Behind these debates it is not hard to distinguish anxieties over the disruption of a previously male homosocial environment. As sport was largely conceived of as a male pursuit, art that concerned itself with sport, sporting technologies, questions of the male body and its supposed physical decline was often aligned with groups such as the Italian futurists, where it chimed well with notions of that male body reimagined, an emphasis on muscularity and action, and a belief in the benefits of competition and records. Similarly, once sport came to be seen as a model or important component of modern society, whether in Western constructivism or Italian rationalism, for example, those thinking about sport and producing work related to it tended to be men. This is not, of course, exclusively the case and I discuss at length work by Leni Riefenstahl and Varvara Stepanova – the latter produced under the 9

Sport and modernism in the visual arts in Europe

specific sporting conditions of the Soviet Union – but it does help to explain the gender imbalance in my examples. In common with a number of studies, I do not see a virtue in drawing strict lines of demarcation between the use of the terms avant-garde and modernism. Rather, artistic movements seeking to innovate and to reflect the period in which they operate are linked by familial ties – with all the antagonisms that can imply – in the same way that we can speak of sport as a practice, but also note the differences between individual sports. My chapters focus on producing detailed analyses of a relatively small part of the corpus of art relating to sport that was produced. They are ordered on thematic lines: sports that were possible thanks only to technical innovations; individual sports; team sports; sports organisations and meetings; and finally, the stadium. Roughly speaking, the examples chosen also adhere to a chronology, so that the first part of the book deals primarily, although not solely, with work produced before the First World War and the years immediately following it, with the second concentrating its attention on the later 1920s and 1930s. The first half of the first chapter concentrates on three paintings of racing cyclists produced in quick succession by German expressionist Feininger, French cubist Metzinger and Italian futurist Umberto Boccioni, analysing them in relation to one another. The second half of this chapter looks at responses to motor-racing from the same three countries. Starting with Marinetti’s notorious infatuation with the motor car, the chapter then considers the importance of the automobile to the purist project of Le Corbusier and Ozenfant. The chapter concludes by looking at a pair of articles that Graeff wrote for the journal G. Although there are many similarities between Graeff’s attitude and those of the purists, it is Graeff who is most uncompromising in his vision of a modern artist-engineer. The second chapter deals with two individual sports. Boxing and tennis might appear strange bedfellows, but as well as being primarily individual sports, they are also united by their transatlantic nature. A word here about American sports. By and large I have omitted much mention of the United States, as I have for Great Britain. In part this is in recognition of Guttmann’s Sports and American Art. But it is also because although the United States again imported sports from Britain, these very quickly took on their American guises of gridiron football and baseball, whereas basketball was an American invention. Moreover, these sports were also notable for the lack of international competition they engendered. A study that tried to encompass American art in addition to that of Europe would miss the singularity of both its sports and visual arts scenes. Tennis and boxing are exceptional in this regard as they, along with athletics, had representatives from the United States competing at the very peak of the sport. Boxing and tennis also shared in a celebrity culture. The flamboyant figures of boxer Johnson and tennis player Lenglen were famous on both sides of the Atlantic. Johnson lived it up in nightclubs in both Paris and London, Lenglen played host to American film stars on the French Riviera. My work on boxing traces this Americanism in the writings and life of Cravan that culminated in the fight against Johnson in 10

Introduction

Barcelona, which is then refracted through the fascination of American journal The Soil for both boxing and Cravan. Tennis was particularly associated with modernist architecture, with players featuring in books written by Le Corbusier, Adolf Behne and Sigfried Giedion. It was also a rare example of a sport where the women’s game attracted as much, if not more, attention as that of the men. This, I contend, caused problems for Le Corbusier, who preferred to concentrate on the geometrical court and the anonymous male players that he includes in his Urbanisme, rather than the glamour and fame of Lenglen, a woman dressed by the couturier Jean Patou and who served as an inspiration for a Jean Cocteau piece for the Ballets Russes. My third chapter deals with the wholesale importation of a British team sport, rugby, into France. Led by de Coubertin, who was the referee in the first French championship, its adoption by the French was a self-conscious response to defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. Choosing rugby over the more proletarian soccer, an haute-bourgeois and aristocratic elite played rugby at Paris’ most exclusive clubs, a moment reimagined by Henri Rousseau. But rugby could not be confined to these environs for long, and by the time of Delaunay’s The Cardiff Team, with its press photograph source, the sport was included alongside aeroplanes, the Eiffel Tower and advertising as a cipher of all that was modern in the Paris of 1913. During the Great War, rugby was celebrated as a sport that had trained its participants to become heroes on the battlefield. This, I surmise, is what led Lhote to produce his cubist paintings of rugby during and after the conflict. De Coubertin was also responsible for the founding of the modern Olympics. Its antique ideals were consecrated in a painting by his father, an artist of the French salon, who pictured modern sportsmen from Paris paying tribute to Athena. My fourth chapter analyses the most notorious visual artwork concerning the games, Riefenstahl’s film of the 1936 event, the so-called Nazi Olympics, Olympia. The status of this film is highly contested in the fields of history and film studies. I argue that the film evinces attitudes not incompatible with, although not reducible to, Coubertin’s own conflicted views on modernity. I contrast it with MoholyNagy’s abortive project to film the same games, before considering Klucis’ designs for the Soviet response to the Olympics, the Spartakiada and other constructivist engagements with sport in light of the Soviet emphasis on fizkultura. As mentioned above, the stadium was invoked by Meyer and others as an example for the arts and architecture. My final chapter concerns this building type, once again with its roots in the antique, but thoroughly reimagined for the twentieth century. Amid a slew of projects two stand out. The first is the aforementioned International Red Stadium in Moscow. Although never realised, with its constructivist impulse it drew attention in Western Europe, partly as a result of being featured in the famous Parisian Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in 1925 and partly by virtue of the contacts that El Lissitzky, who worked on the project, had established there. The second is Pier Luigi Nervi’s remarkable stadium in Florence. Named for a fascist martyr, the Giovanni Berta epitomised Italian rationalist ideals. It, like Raffaello Fagnoni’s 11

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closely related Mussolini stadium in Turin, was aggressively promoted as an example of the modernity of Mussolini’s Italy. If sport was spectacular, then it has also been viewed as simply one distraction among many. Guy Debord’s argument can stand for several here: sport ‘evolves into a contest among phantom qualities meant to elicit devotion to quantitative triviality’; it is specified as part of ‘the never-ending succession of paltry contests – from competitive sports to elections – that are utterly incapable of arousing playful feelings’.33 I hope that this Introduction and what follows will convince the reader that sport was and is anything but a trivial distraction and was and is always shot through with ideological meanings and readings. Notes 1 Theo van Doesburg, ‘The Active Straight Line: Construction versus Composition’, Het Bouwbedrijf 2, no. 4 (Spring 1927), translated in Theo van Doesburg, On European Architecture: Complete Essays from Het Bouwbedrijf, 1924–1931, ed. Cees Boekraad, trans. Charlotte I. Loeb and Arthur L. Loeb (Basel: Birkhäuser, 1990), 127. 2 Hans Richter, ‘To Constructivism’, G 3 (June 1924), translated in G: An Avant-Garde Journal of Art, Architecture, Design, and Film, 1923–1926, eds Detlef Mertins and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Steven Lindberg with Margareta Ingrid Christian (London: Tate, 2010), 146; F. T. Marinetti, ‘The New Ethical Religion of Speed’, L’Italia Futurista (1 June 1916), translated in Marinetti, Critical Writings, ed. Günter Berghaus, trans. Doug Thompson (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 255; F. T. Marinetti and C. R. W. Nevinson, ‘Futurism and English Art’, Lacerba, 15 July 1914, translated in Marinetti, Critical Writings, 95. 3 For a selection of definitions, see Allen Guttmann, Sports: The First Five Millennia (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 4–6; Richard D. Mandell, Sport: A Cultural History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), xvii–xviii; and Steven Connor, A Philosophy of Sport (London: Reaktion, 2011), 15–18. 4 John Foot, Calcio: A History of Italian Football (London: Fourth Estate, 2006), 22. 5 Richard Holt, Sport and Society in Modern France (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1981), 204. 6 (eds) J. L. Martin, Ben Nicholson, Naum Gabo, Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art (London: Faber and Faber, 1937), architecture project 8, 139. 7 Philip Dine, French Rugby Football: A Cultural History (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 29. 8 Relegation and promotion were introduced into Italian soccer in 1909. See Foot, Calcio, 17. 9 F. T. Marinetti, ‘Destruction of Syntax – Untrammeled Imagination – Words-in-Freedom’, in Critical Writings, 122. 10 Mandell, Sport, 139. 11 Siegfried Kracauer, ‘Photography’, in his The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 59. 12 Connor, A Philosophy of Sport, 34–5. 13 Walter Gropius, ‘Introduction’, The Theater of the Bauhaus, ed. Walter Gropius, trans. Arthur S. Wensinger (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 12. 14 Bertolt Brecht, ‘Emphasis on Sport’, Brecht on Theatre, ed. and trans. John Willett (London: Eyre Methuen, 1978), 6. 12

Introduction

15 G.F. Hartlaub, ‘Art and Advertising’, translated in Victor Margolin, ‘Typography, Book Design, and Advertising in the 1920s: A Collection of Documents’, Design Issues 9 (Spring 1993), 74. 16 Heiner Gillmeister, Tennis: A Cultural History (London: Leicester University Press, 1997); Kasia Boddy, Boxing: A Cultural History (London: Reaktion, 2008); Dine, French Rugby Football; Foot, Calcio; John Foot, Pedalare! Pedalare! A History of Italian Cycling (London: Bloomsbury, 2011); Simon Martin, Football and Fascism: The National Game under Mussolini (Oxford: Berg, 2004). 17 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Program for a Sociology of Sport’, trans. John MacAloon and Alan D. Savage, Sociology of Sport Journal 5 (1988), 153. 18 For linguistic similarities, see Norbert Elias, ‘The Genesis of Sport as a Sociological Problem, Part 1’, in The Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilising Process, ed. Eric Dunning, rev. ed. (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2008), 107–9. For Italy’s use of ‘calcio’, see Foot, Calcio, 1–2. 19 See Antonella Russo, Il fascismo in mostra (Rome: Riuniti, 1999), 18–23 and 96–117. 20 Varvara Stepanova writes in a letter of 6 May 1934 to Rodchenko, ‘when you get home you’ll rest here, you’ll go to Dinamo, swim, and get a suntan’. The letter is included in Experiments for the Future: Diaries, Letters, Essays, and Other Writings, ed. Alexander N. Levrentiev, trans. Jamey Gambrell (New York: MoMA, 2005), 295. 21 Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik, High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture, exh. cat. 7 October 1990–15 January 1991, Museum of Modern Art, New York, then touring, 248. 22 Picasso’s Bowl with Fruit, Violin and Wineglass, 1912–13, contains the headline ‘La Vie Sportive’ (Sporting Life), while Bottle of Vieux Marc, Glass and Newspaper, 1913, features a headline for an International Congress of Physical Education. Jeffrey Weiss discusses both works in relation to music hall in The Popular Culture of Modern Art: Picasso, Duchamp, and Avant-Gardism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 22–32. 23 Marinetti, ‘Destruction of Syntax’, 121. 24 Sarah Victoria Turner has made valuable contributions here. See her ‘A “Knot of Living”: Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s Wrestlers’, in New Rhythms: Henri Gaudier-Brzeska: Art, Dance and Movement in London, 1911–1915, ed. Jennifer Powell (Cambridge: Kettle’s Yard, 2015), 90–8; and her ‘In Focus, Wrestlers, 1914, cast 1965, by Henri GaudierBrzeska’, Tate, July 2013, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/gaudierbrzeska-wrestlers (accessed 15 June 2015). See also my ‘ “BLAST SPORT”? Vorticism, Sport and William Roberts’s Boxers’, Modernism/modernity 24, no. 2 (April 2017), 349–70, as well as John Hughson, ‘Not just Any Wintry Afternoon in England: the curious contribution of C. R. W. Nevinson to “football art” ’, International Journal of the History of Sport 28, no. 18 (November 2011), 2670–87 and Mike O’Mahony, ‘Imaging Sport at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art (1929–1937)’, International Journal of the History of Sport 28, nos. 8–9 (May–June 2011), 1105–20. 25 Mandell, Sport, 291. 26 Peter Kühnst, Sports: A Cultural History in the Mirror of Art, trans. Allen Guttmann (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1996). 27 Notable here are Mike O’Mahony’s important Sport in the USSR: Physical Culture – Visual Culture (London: Reaktion, 2006) and Allen Guttmann, Sports and American Art: From Benjamin West to Andy Warhol (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011). 13

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28 Roger Griffin, ‘Modernity, Modernism, and Fascism. A “Mazeway Resynthesis” ’, Modernism/modernity 15, no. 1 (January 2008), 19. 29 André Gounot, ‘Sport or Political Organization? Structures and Characteristics of the Red Sport International, 1921–1937’, Journal of Sport History 28, no. 1 (Spring 2001), 31. 30 Robert Edelman, ‘A Small Way of Saying “No”: Moscow Working Men, Spartak Soccer, and the Communist Party, 1900–1945’, The American Historical Review 107, no. 5 (December 2002), 1455. 31 David Goldblatt, The Ball is Round: A Global History of Football (London: Penguin, 2007), 211–12. 32 Examples include, but are not limited to: Irene Gammel, ‘Lacing Up the Gloves: Women, Boxing and Modernity’, Cultural and Social History 9, no. 3, 369–89; Christina Kiaer, ‘The Swimming Vtorova Sisters: The Representation and Experience of Sport in the 1930s’, Euphoria and Exhaustion: Modern Sport in Soviet Culture and Society, eds Nikolaus Katzer, Sandra Budy, Alexandra Köhring, Manfred Zeller (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2010), 89–109; Fiona Kinsey, ‘Reading Photographic Portraits of Australian Women Cyclists in the 1890s: From Costume and Cycle Choices to Constructions of Feminine Identity’, International Journal of the History of Sport 28, no. 8–9 (May–June 2011), 1121–37; Erik N. Jensen, ‘Belle of the Brawl: The Boxer between Sensationalism and Sport’, chapter 2, Body by Weimar: Atletes, Gender, and German Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 50–98. 33 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone, 1995), 40.

14

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 15

Sport and modernism in the visual arts in Europe

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

1  Lyonel Feininger, The Velocipedists, 1910 16

The man-machine

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 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 17

Sport and modernism in the visual arts in Europe

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

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 18

The man-machine

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 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 mining communities that Emile Zola took as the setting for his novel Germinal. In 1895 a velodrome was built on the edge of Roubaix’s municipal Parc Barbieux. It was inaugurated that June, and the idea for a race from Paris came from Théodore Vienne and Maurice Perez, two local mill owners and the driving forces behind the velodrome’s construction. In March 1896 the pair wrote to Paul Rousseau, director of the newspaper Le Vélo, proposing a race finishing with a few laps of the stadium. The race was run for the first time that following month. In approaching Le Vélo, Vienne and Perez were seeking a combination of publicity and organisational expertise. The press was instrumental in the rise of professional cycling. Le Vélo provided finance and organisation for races such as Bordeaux–Paris and Paris–Roubaix with the aim of increasing circulation and selling advertising space to bicycle manufacturers. The tactic was a successful one and Le Vélo ceased publication in 1904 only because it had been beaten at its own game when its bitter rival, L’Auto, initiated the Tour de France in 1903, trebling its circulation during the course of the first race. L’Auto retained its 19

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position as the leading cycling publication until the Second World War, when it was succeeded by L’Equipe, whose parent company still controls both Paris–Roubaix and the Tour de France today. At the same time that cycling was finding a mass following, the riders were no longer gentlemen amateurs. As Weber notes: ‘The champions of the fin de siècle were delivery boys like Terront, bakers’ apprentices like Constant Huret or Edmond Jacquelin, butcher boys like Louis Pothier, chimney sweeps like Maurice Garin, winner of the first Tour de France.’13 Rather like boxing or soccer, cycling’s heroes were drawn from the ranks of its working-class supporters. The spectators identified with the riders and the riders were offered a way out of menial jobs. As Walter Benjamin puts it, in a rarely cited passage of ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’: It is inherent in … sports that everybody who witnesses its accomplishments is somewhat of an expert. This is obvious to anyone listening to a group of newspaper boys leaning on their bicycles and discussing the outcome of a bicycle race. It is not for nothing that newspaper publishers arrange races for their delivery boys. They arouse great interest among the participants, for the victor has an opportunity to rise from delivery boy to professional racer.14

We can also be sure of the identity of the rider in At the Cycle-Race Track. In 1912 Paris–Roubaix was won by Charles Crupelandt, riding for the La Française– Diamant team. Entering the velodrome in the company of Gustave Garrigou, Crupelandt won the sprint. The wheel of another bike (probably that of Octave Lapize, who, a lap down, led out the sprint for Crupelandt) is to the left of the final painting and the handlebars of Crupelandt’s bike are presented twice, once in negative across his left leg, showing not just a cubist desire to include time in a painting but also a futurist desire to encapsulate the vigorous lateral motion of a sprinting cyclist.15 Period press and publicity photographs confirm the resemblance between Crupelandt and the rider in At the Cycle-Race Track, but the clinching piece of evidence was provided by Sonya Schmid and Erasmus Weddigen in their essay on Metzinger’s work. They reveal that the collaged text ‘PARIS–ROUB’ visible on the hoarding behind the rider actually has a sub-heading, overpainted by the black line forming the base of the hoarding, but still legible on the original. In full the headline reads: ‘PARIS–ROUBAIX: 1er CRUPELANDT, sur LA FRANCAISE’.16 As well as confirming the identity of the rider, Schmid and Weddigen’s discovery means that a sketch for the final work owned by the Pompidou Centre must have been antedated by Metzinger to 1911, so close is it to the composition of the final work.17 As well as the similarities in composition, the rider in the sketch is recognisably the same rider as in the final version, rather than the moustachioed, diminutive, curly haired figure of Lapize, winner of the three previous editions of the race. Schmid and Weddigen conclude from the newspaper clipping that the preparatory material for At the Cycle-Race Track and the painting itself were completed ‘a short time after the race on 7 April’.18 If that is the case, then not only does it come before other works by salon cubists that deal with sport, such as Albert 20

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Gleizes’s The Football Players, 1913, and Robert Delaunay’s first version of The Cardiff Team, 1912–13, a picture of a rugby lineout (which, like Gleizes’s work, will be discussed in detail in chapter three), but it also comes at the same time that, or even before, Picasso makes his iconic collage, Still-Life with Chair Caning, in May 1912. Metzinger himself was ultimately dismissive of the possibilities of collage beyond mere representation, even though here the collaged element has changed its function from newspaper headline to advertising hoarding.19 But the inclusion of the newspaper clipping seems to reinforce the connection between the newspaper industry and races such as Paris–Roubaix. Dauncy and Hare’s description of cycle races as the conjunction of modern sport, mass-circulation newspapers and modern advertising strategies seems pertinent here; Metzinger neatly plays on the connection between the race, advertising and the press by turning the newsprint of the headline ‘Paris–Roubaix’ into an advertisement for the race itself. The advertisement for tyres in the background plays a similar role. At the point of victory, it is not just Crupelandt who has won the race, but superior technology that has given him the opportunity. Cycling was a sport that was thoroughly imbued by commercialism at its very inception. Crupelandt won, in part, because he was riding for the La Française team, amongst the best in the peloton and which therefore attracted the best riders, whose victories it then promoted in its press advertising. Although it was Crupelandt’s first victory in Paris–Roubaix (he won again in 1914), he had already amassed three stage victories in the Tour de France. The period between the race itself and its subsequent commercial exploitation is here reduced to a minimum, or even reversed (since the newspaper headline in full actually refers to Crupelandt’s victory), but then without the newspaper involvement there would have been no race in the first place, so ‘exploitation’ here is the wrong word. Bicycle manufacturers, the sporting press and top riders enjoyed a symbiotic relationship. The rewards were great. Jean Bobet estimates that Lapize won twenty thousand francs for his victory in the four-week 1910 Tour de France alone. This sum was partly comprised of prize money for winning the race (money put up by the newspaper industry), partly the result of winning special prizes along the course, but a significant proportion came in the form of bonuses of two thousand francs from his team, cycle manufacturer Alcyon, and four thousand francs from Dunlop, his tyre manufacturers, in acknowledgement of the advertising opportunity that his sporting triumph would produce.20 Crupelandt immediately took home one thousand francs in prize money for winning Paris–Roubaix.21 After his victory, La Vie au Grand Air, arguably France’s leading sporting periodical, put him on the cover, along with details of the bike he rode and the tyres he used, and it is a safe assumption that he also received payments from both companies.22 By contrast, had he remained a mechanic in Roubaix his annual income could be estimated at a little over fifteen hundred francs.23 At the Cycle-Race Track, with its newsprint and advertising hoardings, as well as its large crowd of fans packed into the Roubaix velodrome, manages to capture not just a moment of sporting achievement but the commercial considerations that underpin its very possibility. 21

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As I discuss in chapter three, Robert Delaunay used a newspaper photograph of a rugby lineout as the basis for his Cardiff Team works. Metzinger had been close to Delaunay and it is legitimate to speculate that Metzinger’s whole knowledge of Crupelandt’s victory came through the reports of it in the newspapers. He surrounds the action with a painted black border, mimicking the framing of photographs in the press and adopts a position in the centre of the velodrome, a location that a photographer would both favour and have access to. Writing of Delaunay’s picture, Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik conclude that: ‘In sum, the picture posits a coalition among adventurism, athletics, technology, publicity and art. And the whole composite alliance is suffused with the glow of a fairground modernity based on the creation of new thrills, spectacles, or amusements – things produced either for their own sake or in hope of profits, but with no excuse in practicality or necessity.’24 Much of that statement also applies to At the Cycle-Race Track, and the fact that Varnedoe and Gopnik include art itself in that coalition is important. For not only was Paris–Roubaix news in 1912, Metzinger himself was. Unlike Picasso and Braque, who did not exhibit in France other than at the gallery of their dealer Kahnweiler, salon cubism was a highly visible movement, launched as a group (at least in the public’s imagination), at the previous year’s Salon des Indépendants, when Metzinger had shown work in the famous Room 41 alongside Delaunay, Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger, Henri Le Fauconnier and Marie Laurencin. The exhibition caused a scandal. Press coverage was extensive. Crupelandt’s victory holds a further point of significance in the analysis of At the Cycle-Race Track. For although the French dominated the race before the First World War, the man nicknamed ‘the bull of the North’ became the first native Roubaisien to win the competition, a fact that formed the basis of much of the coverage of the 1912 race in the press.25 Crupelandt remains so important to regional identity that the final stretch of cobbles before the velodrome in Roubaix is still named after him. Long before Crupelandt won the race, the competition had become vital to the identity of the region. As early as 1898, Victor Breyer, who had test-ridden the course for Le Vélo before the first race, claimed that the Roubaix track could be described ‘without exaggeration as world famous. Its history is intimately bound up with French sport’.26 If Paris–Roubaix was vital to the identity of the region, then that alone cannot be the reason why Metzinger chose to paint it. Metzinger was not from northern France but from Nantes, and, as discussed above, there is no real reason to suppose that he was in the velodrome when Crupelandt won the race. Rather, what seems to have attracted Metzinger was the incorporation of this strong regional identity within an overall French identity. The connection between salon cubism – of which Metzinger, along with Gleizes, was the main theorist and leading practitioner – and French nationalism has been made by both Mark Antliff and David Cottington.27 Several changes that Metzinger made between the preparatory works and the final painting serve to emphasise an overarching national identity. The final painting contains a prominent tricolour, not present in the Pompidou sketch and which is placed in a slightly different location in a second. Additionally, in the tribune 22

The man-machine

of the stand in both sketches there is a figure in a top hat, who is replaced in the final painting by a figure in French military uniform. Superimposed on the rider’s left cheek is another, rotated tricolour, difficult to spot in reproduction but much more apparent when face-to-face with the painting, as it appears at eye level and is bounded by the lines that emphasise Crupelandt’s cheekbone. The view through his face into the crowd reveals ascending bands of blue, white and red. Indeed, the transparency of the face, often accounted for as an attempt to capture the speed of the rider,28 seems better read as an identification between the rider and the crowd, in which Crupelandt, the local, working-class rider, is composed of and serves as an emblem for the crowd behind him.29 Allied to this nationalist sentiment, sport was held to play a key part in countering the supposed degeneration of France, manifested by defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. L’Auto specifically positioned the inaugural Tour de France in this way, writing of the event’s contribution to ‘physical regeneration’.30 Sport’s capacity to contribute to the physical and moral welfare of the nation was still being discussed when Metzinger painted his picture; the philosopher Henri Bergson, an important figure for salon cubists, in an interview just two months after Crupelandt’s victory in Paris–Roubaix, said that: ‘What I like best about sports is the self-confidence it generates. … I believe in a renaissance in French morality’,31 and linked youth, sport and what he termed a ‘magnificent French unity’ in ways that echo Metzinger’s painting. If sport could be considered as one way in which the French nation could respond vigorously to 1870, then so too was art. In the same month that the interview with Bergson was published, the critic Olivier Hourcade asked his readers to ‘consider the renewal of chauvinism in France. Our entire country’s reaction against the 1870 defeats is still taking place, it seems to me. And any country’s reaction has a greater influence on the contemporary arts than people seem to realize.’ As part of that influence, Hourcade listed Metzinger among a group of cubists whose work, he believed, was approaching that ‘real and magnificent result … the creation of a “French” and absolutely independent school of painting’.32 If this argument based on the importance of regional identity within French national identity seems incongruous when placed alongside a reading of Metzinger’s painting as a response to a modern and thoroughly commercial innovation such as the Paris–Roubaix cycle race, a response that borrows some of the formal devices – and even the very fabric – of cycling’s presentation in the press, then we should remember that the race itself was at once a mix of commercial venture and regional/national identity. Indeed, the bicycle that Crupelandt won the race on was the patriotically named La Française. Between 1896, when the first race had been won by the German Josef Fischer, and 1912 the French had dominated Paris–Roubaix, winning all but the 1908 edition. Of the nine editions of the Tour de France completed by the time of At the Cycle-Race Track, eight had been won by French riders (the Luxembourger François Faber won in 1909).33 Cycling was a sport at which the French excelled, running alongside an industry in which they also excelled. It also shared close links to another sport and industry at 23

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which the French were excelling – aviation. The French pilots the Farman brothers had been professional riders before turning to aviation, the emerging industries shared many technologies and both caught the imagination with their combination of man and machine. As with cycling, the exploits of aviators were covered in great detail by the press. Aviation and cycling, as two industries dating from the period after the defeat of 1870, aroused national pride not just amongst the populace, but also amongst artists. In 1912, at the same time that Metzinger was working on At the Cycle-Race-Track, Picasso’s The Scallop Shell (Notre Avenir est dans l’Air) included a book with a tricolour cover, the title of which, ‘Our Future is in the Air’, alludes to the enthusiasm of the French for aviation. Delaunay and Roger de la Fresnaye also completed works in which French aviation played a prominent role. Metzinger’s work might not have quite the same appeal to glamour as paintings that took aviation as their subject, but with 3.5 million bicycles owned in France before the war, it treated a theme with a much wider resonance in terms of the average French citizen’s personal experience. As Weber points out, in comparison to the new technology of the car and the aeroplane, the role of the bicycle ‘tends to be lost from sight behind more spectacular performances. Yet a careful look at the era’s newspapers indicates that, while thousands thrilled at the excitements of new petrol-powered engines, millions looked on the bike as something to admire and also to acquire.’34 Umberto Boccioni and futurist motion Sport plays a marked, if rather unanalysed, role in Italian futurism between 1913 and 1916. Even before Umberto Boccioni’s Dynamism of a Cyclist, F. T. Marinetti wrote that ‘Sport pursued with passion, art and idealism. The concept and love of achieving “records”’35 was among the factors bringing about a new, futurist sensibility and included the bicycle as one of seven types of transport having an effect on the modern psyche. Following Boccioni’s work, Carlo Carrà’s collage Patriotic Festival features the headline ‘SPORTS’ near its centre, clipped from a Gustave Fivé poem in the futurist paper Lacerba. In the manifesto ‘The New Ethical Religion of Speed’, Marinetti declared that ‘sportsmen are the first neophytes of this new religion’, before raising bicycles to the rank of divine objects.36 Finally, Boccioni himself claimed that ‘Tracks, athletic competitions, races exalt us! The finish line is for us the marvellous symbol of modernity.’37 In comparison to Metzinger’s work, Boccioni’s painting offers little to the viewer to aid identification of either a rider or a location. Flavio Fergonzi believes that it is likely that it was based on an actual race and suggests as a source the Giro d’Italia – Italy’s equivalent to the Tour de France, first raced in 1909, the same year as the founding of futurism.38 But in late June 1913 Boccioni was in Paris for the opening of an exhibition of his sculpture and so the first stage of that year’s Tour de France, which left Paris on 29 June, seems a more likely inspiration, given that it is both nearer to the completion of the painting (Fergonzi believes it was painted that September) and that in May, when the Giro was in 24

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Milan, Boccioni was still working to complete the sculptures for Paris, whereas in late June, once the exhibition had opened, he would have had ample opportunity not only to watch the race, but also to consider new themes for his work. Unusually for a movement closely bound to Italian nationalism, the rider’s jersey is not that of the Italian champion, but appears to be that of the champion of Luxembourg or of the Netherlands, in which case the Luxembourger François Faber, winner of Paris–Roubaix in 1913 and, as mentioned above, a previous Tour de France victor, is a possibility. However, Faber, riding for the French Peugeot team, was wearing number nine in the 1913 Tour, rather than fifteen, which was worn by his teammate and eventual winner, the Belgian Philippe Thys, while the Giro was exclusively an Italian affair in 1913.39 But neither the design of the jersey nor the number feature in any of the work’s preparatory sketches, so little can be established. Analysing Dynamism of a Cyclist as if it were a documentary photograph would clearly be a limiting, ultimately frustrating, approach. But a painting can not only tell us a lot about the role of sport; sport can also tell us a lot about the role of painting. The ways in which a painting represents an event can reveal something about that event that photography cannot convey. Nor should we lose sight of the fact that the newspaper photograph’s claims to objectivity are themselves based on a ‘realist convention’.40 There is a widely recounted story that Picasso was taken to task by a fellow passenger on a train for distorting reality. In reply Picasso asked the man what he thought reality looked like. The man produced a photograph of his wife from his wallet. Picasso scrutinised it, turned it in his hand and pronounced ‘She’s very small. And flat.’ Which is to say that, having noted that the newspaper photograph obeys its own conventions, it might be instructive to examine what it is that painting can do that photography – at least newspaper photography in 1912 and 1913 – cannot, as well as studying the different approaches that painters use to convey a ‘fairground modernity’ ill-served by studio portraits of leading cyclists or staged photographs of them signing in at race control. In the case of photographs of professional cyclists, almost the entire photographic record is thoroughly imbricated in the network of newspaper promotion and cycle manufacturer advertising. This is, of course, extremely valuable. Press photography is a condition of the very existence of the sport of cycling and so such photographs provide us with documentary evidence not only about how cycling looked, but also about the structure of the sport itself. But if, as Varnedoe and Gopnik argue, a painting can provide ‘a coalition among adventurism, athletics, technology, publicity and art. And the whole composite alliance is suffused with the glow of a fairground modernity’, then the photographic record conveys little of the adventurism or the art. To say that painting can provide something to aid our appreciation of cycling before the Great War that photography cannot is not, however, sufficient, because the solutions of the painters differ radically, are even opposed. Of course, Metzinger’s work differs in two important respects from the iconography of the newspaper photograph with which it shares so many formal similarities. Firstly, it is colourful, 25

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which is obviously inherent in an oil painting (although colour was something that Picasso and Braque had sought to downplay). But secondly, Metzinger attempts to represent movement. Even if I am sceptical that the transparency of the rider is an effect of the attempt to depict speed, the repetition of the handlebars cannot be read as anything other than a means of suggesting movement through time. In Boccioni’s case, as Fergonzi notes, the artist himself had stated two years previously that the identity of the cyclist was not of paramount concern. Instead Boccioni wanted to capture what he termed ‘the instinct for speed’: I shall tell you that in painting for example a man speeding along on a bicycle we shall try to reproduce the instinct for speed that determines the action, not the visible forward motion of the cyclist. It doesn’t matter to us that the cyclist’s head might touch the edge of the wheel or his body stretch out behind losing itself in vibrations to infinity with an obvious deception of sight, since it is the sensation of the race, not the cyclist that we wish to depict.41

So the solutions that the painters adopt to try to convey movement, or the instinct for speed, differ. Feininger employs a cut-off technique (often used by Edouard Manet and the impressionists), breaking the front wheels of the first two riders at the edge of the canvas to suggest that they are shooting out of the picture (in a charcoal sketch for the work he draws a frame around his group of cyclists, but this frame is broken by the front wheel of the lead cyclist, as if the movement cannot be contained by the drawing). Metzinger employs a repeated element, a solution also favoured by Natalia Goncharova in The Cyclist, where the rider’s body and machine are shown with three or four distinct outlines to represent the cyclist’s juddering progress along a cobbled street. Italian futurists, preoccupied by this question of modern movement, often utilised this solution. But, partly perhaps as a result of its wide adoption, this expedient increasingly displeased Boccioni. Dynamism of a Cyclist exemplifies, for Boccioni, a new kind of representation of movement and it does so in critical dialogue with works such as Metzinger’s and Goncharova’s The Cyclist. This is not to suggest that Boccioni cynically adopted a sporting theme (his earlier use of the bicycle theme and Marinetti’s declaration of the importance of sport to Italian futurism preclude this) but, rather, that his cycling painting is a move in a wider game being played out amongst European avant-gardes generally and between Italian futurism and salon cubism in particular. Like Feininger, Boccioni had first become aware of cubist painting in 1911, visiting the Salon d’Automne – where Metzinger was showing with his salon cubist colleagues – and meeting Picasso. It resulted in an immediate and substantial change in his work. In February 1912 he returned to Paris with his new paintings as part of the First Futurist exhibition. As the movement’s chief writer and theorist of manifestos on painting and sculpture, Boccioni quickly assumed a key role in debates between cubists and futurists. A series of studies demonstrates both the increasing abstraction of the rider and the efforts Boccioni went to in order to suggest the effects that the rider had on the atmosphere around him. This, in turn, was part of an attempt by 26

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Boccioni to distinguish his work from that of the cubists. It is likely that Boccioni was aware of Feininger’s The Bicycle Race through its reproduction in Les Tendences Nouvelles.42 The exhibition history of Metzinger’s At the Cycle-Race Track is harder to trace, but it is certain that Boccioni had asked for reproductions of the works on sporting themes by Metzinger’s cubist collaborators – Gleizes’s The Football Players and Delaunay’s The Cardiff Team: Third Version – following their exhibition at the 1913 Salon des Indépendants.43 Fergonzi believes that it was ‘possible that Boccioni was aware of Metzinger’s At the Cycle-Race Track, either directly or through a photographic reproduction’.44 Boccioni’s next painting strongly suggests that he was indeed aware of Metzinger’s cycling work. Following the completion of Dynamism of a Cyclist he produced the larger Dynamism of a Footballer, which is surely a response to Gleizes’s The Football Players and suggests that Boccioni was indeed aware of At the Cycle-Race-Track. If this is the case, Dynamism of a Cyclist is a specific response to Metzinger as well as to salon cubism generally. Part of Boccioni’s problem was that Metzinger, Gleizes and Delaunay, in taking up themes of modern entertainment, were leaving behind more conservative landscapes and still-lifes and beginning to occupy the territory from which the futurists had launched their initial critiques of cubism. In Metzinger’s case this was perhaps, as Joann Moser writes, as a direct consequence of Italian futurism.45 The antedating of the Pompidou’s Metzinger sketch for At the Cycle-Race Track to 1911, a date which suggests a pre-futurist genesis for the work, can be read as Metzinger’s attempt to avoid the accusation that he was merely jumping on the Italian futurist bandwagon in the same way that his critics thought that he had plagiarised Picasso’s ideas in order to become a cubist in the first place.46 Boccioni spent much of 1913 writing press articles to assert the ‘absolute priority’ of Italian futurism ‘for all dynamic experiments’.47 Severini recalls receiving Boccioni’s ‘fierce letter’ requesting further information on works from the 1913 Indépendants and quotes the letter at length: It is necessary that you find out in any case, about the tendency (in my opinion, ephemeral) of Orphism [Guillaume Apollinaire’s term for Delaunay’s art]. This is trickery performed on Futurism that they refuse to admit … Try to find any sort of reproductions, newspapers, magazines and photographs. You will be promptly reimbursed. Get the opinions of Picasso, Kahnweiler, at the Closerie des Lilas, of Sagot, Canudo, Apollinaire. What do they think of this Orphism, what is being said about it, and do they see that it is influenced by us?48

Boccioni immediately responded to this perceived slight on futurism with the article ‘The Futurists Plagiarised in France’. Here, as well as attacking critics for denying futurism the respect that he felt was owed, he laid the groundwork for his attempt to differentiate cubist and futurist portrayals of motion: ‘Italian Futurist painting has enriched the object, grasping it in the environment – that is to say, living it in its life: which is motion.’49 In the same essay, Boccioni proposes 27

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a ‘religious intoxication for the new’ that Marinetti was to pick up on three years later in his essay ‘The New Ethical Religion of Speed’ and, armed with Boccioni’s subsequent paintings of cyclists and footballers, connect to sportsmen.50 In August, the month before Dynamism of a Cyclist was painted, Boccioni published an essay, ‘Futurist Dynamism and French Painting’, on Fernand Léger, which although ostensibly delighted by the supposed spread of futurist influence, called on both critics and artists to acknowledge the Italian movement’s primacy. The essay also drew Metzinger directly into the case, for, as Boccioni gleefully pointed out, the cubist critic Roger Allard had already expressed ‘a number of doubts about the Futurist dynamism of J. Metzinger’.51 But although Boccioni would have been appreciative of this acknowledgement of the precedence of futurism, he too was clearly disturbed by the way in which Delaunay and Metzinger’s work brought the distinction between cubism and futurism into question. During the autumn Boccioni developed a new conception of plastic dynamism arising out of his sculptural work based on the combination of the motion of an object (its absolute motion, in terminology Boccioni borrowed from Bergson) situated in the environment that surrounds it (its relative motion). He used this conception in order to distance himself from a representation of motion based on repetition of legs, arms and faces – or, thinking of Metzinger’s painting, handlebars. By December Boccioni was propounding ‘an infinite succession of events … not to be found in the repetition of legs, arms and faces, as many people have idiotically believed, but [which] is achieved through the intuitive search for the one single form which produces continuity in space.’52 In her discussion of the painting, Poggi describes how ‘Boccioni relies on contrasting colours and varied brushwork to evoke the interpenetration of the figure and the environment as an effect of velocity’ and notes that: ‘As the rider/bicycle complex penetrates the surrounding atmosphere … it casts swells of wind to either side.’53 Boccioni was obviously happy at this point to take on the salon cubists on the sporting themes they had selected. Despite the similarity of the subject, it is that new conception that Boccioni employs in Dynamism of a Cyclist, a painting that is best understood as an effort to engage with the modern subject of sport in a manner that attempts to avoid confusion with the cubist canvases that preceded it. Cycle racing is one of a handful of sports that were not only codified during the modern period, as most sports were, but produced by it. By this I do not simply make the point that the bicycle, like the motor car, was a modern invention that could be raced. Rather, dependent on industrial capitalism for its product, the sport itself was organised in a new way: the press not only reported on the sporting events but engineered them; the riders did not represent their country or a specific town but a brand, which in itself seemed to underscore the bicycle as a technology of movement not tied to a specific location; and advertising was conceived of not as a supplement to the sport’s existence but integral to its conditions of possibility. In its embrace of modernity, as well as its conjunction of man and machine, it offered an attractive subject matter for the pre-war avantgardes. Although the attraction that the sport held for all the painters shared 28

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some of the same characteristics, the works are not equivalent to one another. Feininger offers the individual as subsumed within a greater whole; Metzinger mobilises the modernity of the sport, its spectacle, but also its domination by the French; Boccioni’s analysis of movement integrates the rider into his surrounding environment. These responses are fluid, overdetermined by the moves that others make in the same field. Much the same way, in fact, that a bicycle race can look from the outside to be an example of perfect harmony but is in reality made up of competitors who enter into shifting alliances in an attempt to outmanoeuvre one another. Motor racing It was with a motor car that futurism began, and in the remainder of this chapter I will look more briefly at three engagements with motor racing that once again come from Italy, France and Germany, but which occur over a longer period of time and evince very different attitudes to the sport. The history of motor racing in Europe parallels that of cycling, in that races were organised by the press and, eventually, the sport became dominated by trade teams from the big motoring manufacturers. The inaugural president of the Automobile Club de France (ACF), the Count de Dion, was not only a racing driver but was also one half of the De Dion–Bouton marque of car and a major backer of L’Auto, the sports newspaper that devised the Tour de France.54 Like cycling, the first motor races, beginning with Paris–Rouen in 1894, were raced on public roads. The sport was also dominated by the French, with the ACF being the world’s first automobile club. The grand prix it organised in 1906, another first, was won by a Renault, perpetuating the French dominance of the international Gordon Bennett Cup, where four of the six editions had been won by the French team.55 Rivals to the French emerged during this decade from Italy and, to a lesser extent, Germany. There were important differences from cycling, however. As powerful cars were very expensive, racing them was initially ‘an unashamedly socially exclusive pastime’.56 Gentlemen amateurs, men who nevertheless competed in races in which prize money was offered but who did not make their living as professional drivers, raced alongside salaried employees of manufacturers until much later than their cycling equivalents. This was still the case when Marinetti began to write about the sport. Secondly, the racing car developed more quickly and with greater variety than the bicycle. This was partly as a result of the relative complexity of the machine and partly because technological innovations were not always apparent to competitors, being hidden from view. These modern machines were a source of immediate fascination to the public; an estimated one hundred thousand people turned up to watch the start of the aborted Paris–Madrid race at Versailles in 1903, even though it was held at half-past three in the morning. Three million apparently lined the French roads to Bordeaux before eight fatalities amongst competitors and spectators precipitated a move to circuit racing on closed roads with rudimentary crowd control.57 Among the disappointed crowd waiting at Saint-Sebastian for a race 29

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that never reached it was the artist Amédée Ozenfant, whose views on motor racing will be discussed below.58 In ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’, Marinetti famously declared that: ‘A racing car with a hood that glistens with large pipes resembling a serpent with explosive breath … that is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace’, this twentieth-century judgement of Paris finding for the modern racer against the classical statue that stood in the entrance to the Louvre.59 The claim closely follows the narrative section of the manifesto, in which ‘famished automobiles’ roar beneath the windows, summoning Marinetti and his companions to drive them.60 He describes being ‘stretched out on my car like a corpse in its coffin’, before he speeds off on an exhilarating dice with death, notoriously overturning his car in a ditch in an attempt to avoid two wobbling cyclists.61 This could have been the end of the story, and it had been when Marinetti really did roll his car off the road in October 1908.62 In the inaugural manifesto, however, the vehicle is righted, having lost its ‘heavy chassis of good sense and soft upholstery of comfort’.63 The difference between the powerful four-cylinder Fiat that Marinetti drove in real life (figure 3) and a contemporary Fiat racing car (figure 4) lay largely in this ‘soft upholstery of comfort’. Racing cars were little more than a chassis on which was mounted a huge engine at the front, a very big and long steering wheel, behind which were twin seats for the driver and an obligatory accompanying mechanic, with a fuel tank mounted on the rear, above or behind which spare tyres could be stored for the inevitable punctures. In Marinetti’s terms this stripping-down of the car transforms it from snarling beast to predatory

3  F. T. Marinetti in his Fiat car, 1908 30

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4  Vincenzo Lancia and his mechanic in his Fiat racing car at the 1907 Targa Florio

shark; more prosaically, the stripped-down car in which Marinetti drives on more nearly resembles a racing car. Marinetti’s interest in, and indeed conception of, the car predated the launch of futurism. In 1905 he published a poem, ‘To the Automobile’, which figured the machine as a ‘Vehement god of a race of steel’, a ‘formidable Japanese monster with eyes like a forge, fed on fire and mineral oils’.64 As in ‘The Founding and Manifesto’, the poem, later retitled ‘To My Pegasus’, consistently vitalises the machine, which is described as ‘stamping with anguish, champing at the bit’, having ‘metallic reins’ and ‘brazen lungs endlessly exploding’.65 Following the cry ‘Let the engine’s pulse centuple!’ the driver’s metal steed attains the speed to leave Earth altogether, allowing him to become one with the sky.66 This same motif was rehearsed in another pre-futurist work, ‘Death at the Wheel’. Alone amongst Marinetti’s writings on cars and racing this acknowledges an inspiration, albeit only in a parenthetical line between title and text, which informs the reader that the setting of the piece is Brescia on the day of the Coupe de la Vitesse, or Speed Cup.67 This establishes the date as 2 September 1907, when presumably Marinetti was in attendance to watch the trophy claimed by Alessandro Cagno, one of the early greats of Italian motor sport, driving an Itala.68 Had Marinetti also been present for the previous day’s Florio Cup race, which drew a reported one hundred thousand-strong crowd, he would have seen, or quickly been aware of, the fatal crash involving Baron de Martino’s Züst car. An amateur, de Martino somersaulted near the grandstands, ‘being pinned by 31

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the steering rod, which pierced his chest’, perhaps inspiring ‘The Founding and Manifesto’s description of Marinetti’s steering wheel as ‘a guillotine blade that menaced my stomach’.69 He also would have seen Vincenzo Trucco drive his Isotta-Fraschini car to fourth place. Just over a year later, Trucco would be one of two Isotta-Fraschini racing drivers who came to Marinetti’s aid following his own crash. Having received ‘little more than a scare’, Marinetti was driven home by Trucco, while his mechanic was taken to hospital by Trucco’s teammate to be ‘treated for minor wounds’.70 More pertinently perhaps, given Marinetti’s title, the Speed Cup was notable for its crashes. Cagno drove the three hundred miles at a then-impressive average speed of 65.2 mph. (which includes delays caused by punctures in an era before pneumatic jacks). According to historian of motor racing Henry Serrano Villard, it was this ‘pitiless pace’ that caused numerous accidents, including that of Shepard, who ‘went through a bridge into a river’, but happily survived.71 If the Baron’s demise was the inspiration for ‘Death at the Wheel’, then the piece is hardly a faithful portrayal of the races at Brescia. Cars become ‘a great metallic jaguar still torpid with sleep … strange vehicles of aggressive shape which one would have taken for enormous four-wheeled revolvers’, or ‘a monstrous turtle pulled by corsairs with red hats’.72 As with Marinetti’s earlier poem, the race ends with the drivers leaving the Earth by combined force of will and speed. ‘Those who wish it, will fly to the sky!… Those who believe will triumph! We must believe and will!…’.73 If Shepard’s crash into a river represents a fledgling attempt at Nietzschean transcendence, de Martino’s death at the wheel, all suggestion of banal mechanical failure repressed, serves to make the driver ‘immortal by a stroke of will’.74 The motifs established by Marinetti’s pre-futurist work continued into futurism itself. In addition to ‘The Founding and Manifesto’, Gustave Fivé’s ‘words-infreedom’ poem ‘Sports’, the title of which Carrà used in his Patriotic Festival following its publication in Lacerba, concerns a point-to-point motor race. Checks between the mechanic and driver are carried out before the car embarks on a series of close encounters on open roads, narrowly avoiding a cart, a cow and a herd of pigs, before finally making the control point.75 This was not uncommon. Villard recounts an unnamed French racing driver recalling these early years: ‘ “The destruction of animals,” he explained rather cold-bloodedly, was good reason “for the wearing of a leather uniform when travelling at high speed. When struck, the animal is apt to scatter very unpleasantly. Not to go into detailed description, I have seen a racing car come in from a long contest fairly plastered with feathers.” ’76 Marinetti returned to the motor racing at length in ‘The New Ethical Religion of Speed’, where, alongside the bicycle, the divine includes racing-car circuits, combustion engines, rubber tyres, gasoline, the ‘religious ecstasy inspired by one hundred horsepower. And the joy of moving from third to fourth gear. The joy of pressing down on the accelerator. The growling pedal of musical speed.’77 He continues with a hymn to ‘the wonderful drama of zooming along on the racetrack’, taking a chicane, or ‘double bend’, when: 32

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The car tends toward splitting itself in two. The heaviness of the rear portion, which turns into a cannonball and searches for slopes, ditches, the center of the earth, for fear of new dangers. Better to perish at once than continue to take more risks. No! No! No! All glory be to the Futurist supertrain which, with a mere shrug of the shoulders or touch of the wheel, will pull the rear end of the vehicle away from the ditch and set it, once again, upon its straight course. … The double bend conquered at speed is the supreme manifestation of life.78

Here there is no flight, nor is there a crash: ‘Speed on a bend and after the bend is speed come alive, and controlled.’79 Death at the wheel is now rejected in favour of the life-affirming skill of the futurist driver. But, published in 1916, ‘The New Ethical Religion of Speed’ comes after the first wave of futurist painting. It is possible that Marinetti’s earlier conception of the racing car, with its roots in symbolism, actually inhibited the futurist painters from taking up the theme; it is hard to see how the depiction of car as big cat, or car as revolver, could be anything but hackneyed when transferred to canvas. Giacomo Balla began his futurist career with studies of movement, but employed resolutely non-mechanised subjects: a girl running, a dog on a leash, or the flight patterns of swifts, for example. When he did turn to the automobile he did so with a vengeance, with over one hundred works taking it as the primary subject.80 But motor racing is not the chief interest in these.81 The one work that might visualise Marinetti’s repeated invocations of the racing car is Luigi Russolo’s Dynamism of an Automobile, 1913 (figure 5). As in his earlier Revolt, 1911, movement against an urban backdrop is emphasized through a series of repeated chevrons. These are derived from Ernst Mach’s images of the sound waves produced by a speeding bullet (figure 6), a fitting analogue for the car.82 With a lone driver at the wheel and retaining a suggestion of the ‘soft upholstery of comfort’, Russolo’s car is unlikely to be involved in a race. It moves at speed however, with streams of gold emerging from its wheels and even from the air which it displaces just in front of its body, tilting the city’s architecture as it leaves it in its wake. It also contains its share of futurist irrationality, with its jarring colour scheme. Poggi’s claim that Balla’s speeding cars ‘are conceived against the Taylorist model of time management in the interest of efficient productivity, as a celebration of velocity’, is even more apt in relation to Dynamism of an Automobile.83 Other than Marinetti himself, futurism’s drivers are never identified, yet they are central to its conception of a man-machine complex in line with the ‘The Founding and Manifesto’s intention to ‘hymn man at the steering wheel’.84 Whether crashing, negotiating a chicane or hunched over the wheel speeding through a city, it is their responsiveness to the vehicle, their ability to react to it or cajole it back into life, to become as one with it that marks them out. This is, again, part of the image of the early racing driver: [A]lthough racing was a contest of machines and a display of technology, it was also a celebration of human gallantry, fortitude and achievement. Manliness was central to this glorification of the driver … The heroic qualities ascribed to 33

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5  Luigi Russolo, Dynamism of an Automobile, 1912 racing drivers, such as bravery, courage and composure, epitomised ‘character building’ traits.… Moreover, although drivers were acclaimed for their ‘artistry’ and ‘style’ behind the wheel, this was described emphatically as a manly virtue.85

Purist and constructivist responses to the motor car This emphasis on the driver is largely absent from other modernist responses to the racing car, however, which concentrate on the engineering of the machine. Ozenfant noted that Marinetti and the futurists celebrated machines for ‘their racket, their vibrations, their smoke, their sparks: which are precisely the signs of poor performance’.86 Instead, purism would take inspiration from the rational and the efficient. More precisely, according to Ozenfant, it would take inspiration from the victory of the German Mercedes team over the French cars at the July 1914 Grand Prix. Characterised as a triumph of ‘preparation and methodical organisation’ over ‘French ingenuity’, the Germans had worked on every detail of the engine in order to refine it. ‘This lesson of planning and good execution’, he recalled, ‘impressed me enormously – and I promised myself to follow this example in my paintings and in my life.’87 Car designs do not feature in the paintings of purism, but they are a significant reference point in L’Esprit Nouveau, the magazine Ozenfant edited with Le Corbusier. 34

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6  Ernst Mach, Photograph showing a speeding bullet, 1887

Published between the end of 1920 and the start of 1925, L’Esprit Nouveau provided the basis for the books Le Corbusier published in the mid-1920s. He included a selection of racing cars in the ‘Eyes That Do Not See’ section of his classic Toward an Architecture. Following analyses of liners and aeroplanes, the automobile concludes the presentation of the products of industry as evidence of the new spirit. The very last page-opening of this argument juxtaposes, for a final time, the development of the automobiles to a photograph of the Parthenon (figure 7).88 This photomontaged history of the motor car was the only significant amendment to the publication of ‘Eyes That Do Not See… III Automobiles’ in L’Esprit Nouveau and was added when Le Corbusier came to produce a revised and enlarged edition of Toward An Architecture in 1924.89 It first appeared in the penultimate issue of L’Esprit Nouveau at around the time Le Corbusier was revising the text of the book, but it has its roots in a double-page spread in another issue of the magazine that demonstrated, using eighteen line drawings, the development of the motor car from 1900 to 1921.90 Two photographs bookended these drawings, one of a vintage 1900 car, the second of a contemporary racing car. Converting the eighteen drawings into just six photographs allowed this focus on racing to be sharpened, as well as demonstrating an indexical link to existing engineering in a more concrete manner than the line drawings permitted. Le Corbusier’s attitude towards the actual cars is somewhat ambivalent. When published in L’Esprit Nouveau the photographs had numbers and a key to 35

Sport and modernism in the visual arts in Europe

7  Le Corbusier, ‘In Search of a Standard’, Toward an Architecture, 1924

identify the vehicles. In the book this is omitted. In both versions the photographs have been tipped out to remove some detail that Le Corbusier presumably considered extraneous, but he left the newspaper captions attached to them, even, in the case of the car at the bottom left, remounting the caption so that it appears superimposed on the photograph. Through the captions it is still possible to identify the cars, even though the lack of the key makes this much more arduous. Le Corbusier’s vacillation on this point is because the individual cars have to stand in for all cars at a specific point of production, as the line drawings had, but also must represent a milestone in the development of the automobile, demonstrated by some sort of achievement, to which the captions for the four modern cars do indeed refer. The treatment of the cars, then, is caught between a requirement for them to be simultaneously generic and singular, driven by particular drivers at a particular time and yet also representative of impersonal engineering advances. But we can also suppose that if the cars had been the subject of press attention it is possible that they would be readily recognisable by a contemporary French reader. Read from top to bottom, the 36

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images tell a story of progress and refinement. On the top row, two prototype automobiles are illustrated: Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot’s steam car of 1769 and Amédée Bollée’s steam-powered Obedient, which travelled from Le Mans to Paris in 1875. Below this there are two Italian cars. On the left is the Alfa Romeo that Giuseppe Campari drove to victory in the 1924 European Grand Prix. To its right is Mephistopheles, a behemothic Fiat whose origins dated back to 1908 and which was capable of producing three hundred horsepower. In July 1924 it captured the land speed record when Ernest Eldridge III pushed it to a fraction over 146 mph.91 Despite their recent successes, these cars were principally reliant on massive engines rather than engineering innovation. Writing in L’Esprit Nouveau, a Dr St-Quentin (in reality Ozenfant, who used a variety of pseudonyms on the journal and who was born in Saint-Quentin) blamed the suspension of racing during and immediately after the Great War for such ‘mammoth automobiles which are a clear regression on the sports cars of before the war’.92 This charge could not be levelled at the final pair of cars. On the left was the runner-up to Campari in the 1924 European Grand Prix, Albert Divo, driving for the Parisian marque Delage, whose 2LCV machine was the first European Grand Prix car to arrange its twelve cylinders in a V formation.93 A further significant difference was at the rear of the car, which tapered much more noticeably than Campari’s Alfa Romeo, giving it some streamlining advantages. Despite its loss to the Alfa, the Delage represented an engineering advance on it. This is again illustrated in the final car, Malcolm Campbell’s Bluebird. In September 1924, this broke the land speed record set earlier in the year by Mephistopheles and then raised it the following year to just over 150 mph. Le Corbusier captioned this montage ‘In search of a standard’ and it relates not simply to the architecture of the Parthenon, but also to a diagram he reproduces above it, showing the shape that offers least resistance to be a teardrop. Bluebird is seen from the back, where its elongated form comes to a point. Yet the argument, although correct, is tendentious, as both Bluebird and the Delage were relatively flat at the front. I will return to the significance of sport for Le Corbusier and Ozenfant in the following chapter, but meanwhile in Germany another figure was thinking seriously about the intersection between racing car design, streamlining and the arts. Werner Graeff, a former student at the Bauhaus, was also a motor mechanic. He attended Theo van Doesburg’s classes at Weimar and joined de Stijl as a result. Probably his best-known work, one that exemplified the task of what he termed the artist-engineer, was a design for a motorcycle that was reproduced in De Stijl and the Hungarian constructivist journal MA.94 In 1923, Graeff joined Hans Richter and El Lissitzky on the editorial board of a new review, G, short for Gestaltung or ‘form-creation’. Graeff had no interest in Le Corbusier’s project to link car design to the architecture of the past. The opening statement of G’s first issue was: ‘The opposition between modern form-creation (in art) and yesterday’s art is one of principle. We do not wish to bridge it but to deepen it.’95 In the third issue, published in June 1924, Graeff wrote two essays on car design 37

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with the interrogative titles ‘What Do You Know About the Automobile of the Future?’ and ‘Most German Cars Have Pointed Radiators: You are partly to blame!’ (figure 8).96 In the first essay, Graeff embarked on a detailed, multilingual (German, French, English and Russian) and photographic presentation of the designs of the German engineer Edmund Rumpler. This went well beyond Le Corbusier’s largely visual appropriation of car design. Graeff took Rumpler’s distinctive Waterdrop Automobile and looked at its drive axle, semiaxles, rear-mounted engine, as well as its aerodynamic styling, demonstrating how they differed from previous models. He concluded the piece by pointing to the adoption of some of Rumpler’s principles by the Benz racing cars, which finished fourth and fifth in the European Grand Prix of 1923. This emphasis on linking technological ideas to racing cars was continued in the second essay, on radiators. The essay opens with a picture of an Aga car winning a race in 1924. As Graeff points out, these cars had a streamlined teardrop shape, but their radiators were mounted independently of the bodywork. The Aga’s performance is important because it bears out Graeff’s principles of elemental construction. These are threatened however, by the German public’s failure to grasp the subtleties of aerodynamics, believing the pointed radiators are ‘necessary to “cut through” the air’.97 Moreover, in their rush to sell cars, the German automotive industry had pandered to the misguided public and produced cars with integrated pointed radiators. This realisation that public taste might override rational design threatened G’s whole project, although it is an aspect that Le Corbusier did not take into account at all in his search for a standard. It would, of course, become a very important factor in car design, especially in the United States of the 1950s, when Harley Earl’s designs sacrificed all notions of performance in favour of such features as chrome bumpers and space-rocket fins. Graeff, however, still hoped to educate the public. He made three major claims. Firstly, that pointed radiators are not best aerodynamically. Secondly, that the teardrop shape is best aerodynamically, but that this is not desirable for radiators as they are supposed to let air through in order to cool the engine, rather than push air round the radiator. Finally, in order to achieve this, a flat radiator, mounted separately from a teardrop-shaped body, as in the Aga, is best. These arguments are, broadly speaking, correct, although modern radiators on racing cars are situated in ducts, which allow much greater control of the airflow, rather than being separately mounted.98 Motor sport is important to Graeff because it acts as a laboratory and proving ground for new innovations, overriding public taste. As he writes: ‘The ideal of beauty, my dear automobile manufacturers, is very much dependent on a perception of functionality. As soon as the public understands that pointed is wrong, it will begin to love flat radiators.’99 In contrast to Le Corbusier, in neither article is the name of a driver decipherable. The machine stands as an example on its own. Still less is there any invocation of driving experience, none of Marinetti’s exhilaration. These differences are instructive, as they point to changing attitudes to sport amongst the avant-gardes. My motor racing examples move from a focus 38

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8  Werner Graeff, ‘Most German Cars Have Pointed Radiators: You are partly to blame!’, G, no. 3 (June 1924)

39

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on the spectacular character of the early years of the sport, something shared with the cycling paintings and many other depictions of sport prior to the First World War. Ozenfant’s comment that the futurists concentrated on racket, vibrations, smokes and sparks at the expense of the signs of good performance had clearly been overturned by the time that Graeff and Le Corbusier were writing. Sport was now held up as a model, rather than as a spectacle. Finally, the importance of motor sport to writers, artists, architects and artist-engineers reminds us that, even if it is not always present in art objects, sport played a significant part in the modernist imaginary. Notes 1 Christine Poggi, Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 73. 2 Eugen Weber, France, Fin de Siècle (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1986), 195. 3 Philippe Gaboriau, ‘The Tour de France and Cycling’s Belle Epoque’, The International Journal of the History of Sport 20, no. 2 (June 2003), 57. 4 Gino Severini, The Life of a Painter: The Autobiography of Gino Severini, trans. Jennifer Franchina (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 94. 5 Quoted in Erasmus Weddigen, ‘The Champion’, Cycling, Cubism and the Fourth Dimension: Jean Metzinger’s At the Cycle-Race Track, exh. cat. Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 9 June–6 September 2012, 33. Weddigen quotes from Metzinger’s diary, related to him by Božema Nikiel, and places the feat at the end of 1911 or early in 1912. 6 Hugh Dauncy and Geoff Hare, ‘The Tour de France: A Pre-Modern Contest in a Post-Modern Context’, The International Journal of the History of Sport 20, no. 2 (June 2003), 8. 7 Feininger, Letter to Alfred Vance Churchill, 13 March 1913, quoted in Hans Hess, Lyonel Feininger (London: Thames and Hudson, 1961), 56. 8 Feininger, Les Tendences Nouvelles, 56 (1912), quoted in Hess, Lyonel Feininger, 55. 9 Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games, trans. Meyer Barash (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 45. 10 Gaboriau, ‘The Tour de France and Cycling’s Belle Epoque’, 70. 11 Caillois, Man, Play and Games, 22. Agôn is Caillois’s term for any game or sport with a competitive element between participants. 12 Population figures and visitor numbers from Pascal Sergent, ‘19 avril 1896: la légende est en marche’, ‘un « Manchester Français »’ and ‘la « cité aux milles cheminées »’ from Corinne Delmas, ‘Lire la course: l’épreuve pris aux maux’, in 100 Paris–Roubaix; patrimoine d’un siècle, ed. Sébastien Fleuriel (Villeneuve d’Ascq [Nord]: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2002), 19 and 77, 79 respectively. 13 Weber, France, 200. 14 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992), 225. 15 See the account of the 1912 race provided by Pascal Sergent, A Century of Paris–Roubaix, trans. Richard Yates (London: Bromley, 1997), n.p. 16 Sonya Schmid and Erasmus Weddigen, ‘Jean Metzinger und die “Königin der Klassiker” Eine Cyclopädie des Kubismus’, Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch Bund 59 (1998), 238. ‘1er’ 40

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28 29

30

is the French abbreviation for ‘First’. My thanks to Ricarda Vidal for translating parts of this essay from the German. Joann Moser mentions the problems in dating Metzinger’s works from this period, exacerbated because ‘some works may have been backdated by Metzinger himself much later in his career’. Moser, ‘Introduction’, Jean Metzinger in Retrospect, exh. cat. University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City, 31 August–13 October 1985, then touring, 7. In the case of this particular drawing, Schmid and Weddigen, ‘Jean Metzinger’, 235, also find the date unconvincing and point out that the work is signed and dated over part of the paper that has been scratched. Schmid and Weddigen, ‘Jean Metzinger’, 236. In a 1913 essay for a Czech journal, ‘Kubistická Technika’, Metzinger wrote that: ‘Certain artists are satisfied … with gluing onto their canvases cutouts of signs, stamps, newspaper clippings, etc. What could be more logical? I repeat: these things have no intrinsic artistic value of their own, they are incidental and of little importance.’ Translated by Ivana Horacek in A Cubism Reader: Documents and Criticism, 1906–1914, eds Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 610–11. Jean Bobet, Lapize: Now There Was an Ace, trans. Adam Berry (Norwich: Mousehold Press, 2010), 75. The sum reported in Le Radical, 9 April 1912, 5. La Vie Au Grand Air, 13 April 1912. Figures for a three-hundred-day working year and a daily rate of five francs for a mechanic in Roubaix in 1906 are given in the government publication Salaires et coût de l’existence à diverses époques, jusqu’en 1910 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1911), 166. Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik, High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture, exh. cat. 7 October 1990–15 January 1991, Museum of Modern Art, New York, then touring, 248. See Delmas, ‘Lire la course’, 80, n. 28. Sergent, A Century of Paris–Roubaix, reproduces the front page of Le Nord Illustré for 15 April 1912, with its photograph of Crupelandt signing at race control following his victory (the photograph is staged for the benefit of the press; Crupelandt looks up at the cameras, rather than down at his pen, in a pose common to a variety of ceremonial signings from peace treaties to wedding registers) and its headline ‘A Roubaisien has won on the Paris–Roubaix cycling course’. The front cover of La Vie au Grand Air also recognised that Crupelandt was from the town. Victor Breyer, quoted in Sergent, ‘19 avril 1896’, 20. Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 106–34; David Cottington, Cubism in the Shadow of War: The Avant-Garde and Politics in Paris, 1905–1914 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 87–122. See Moser, Jean Metzinger in Retrospect, 43 and Irène Mercier, ‘Le Cycliste, 1912’, in Le Futurisme à Paris: une avant-garde explosive, ed. Didier Ottinger (Milan and Paris: 5 Continents and Pompidou Centre, 2008), 194. Jeffrey T. Schnapp terms ‘emblematic’ portraits in which the face or body of the subject is composed of a multitude of other bodies and writes that the production of such work ‘serves as a vehicle less for the loss of boundaries between individuals than for the triumph of (collective) Form’, ‘Mob Porn’, in Crowds, eds Schnapp and Matthew Tiews (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 5. Georges Vigarello, ‘The Tour de France’, 479. 41

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31 Bergson, quoted in interview by J. Bertaut, ‘Réponse à une enquête sur la jeunesse’, Le Gaulois Littéraire, 15 June 1912. Quoted in Vigarello, ‘The Tour de France’, 472. For a further discussion of this interview, see Antliff, Inventing Bergson, 96 and 211, n. 83. 32 Olivier Hourcade, ‘Le mouvement pictoral: Vers une école française de peinture’, in Antliff and Leighten, A Cubism Reader, 299, 300. 33 Some records show Maurice Garin as an Italian when he won the 1897 and 1898 editions of Paris–Roubaix. Born in a French-speaking part of Italy, he had been resident in northern France from childhood, but the date of his naturalisation is uncertain. He had certainly taken French citizenship by the time he won the inaugural Tour de France in 1903. Faber was also a French resident. Born in France to a Luxemburgish father, he was known as ‘The Giant of Colombes’ after the suburb of Paris in which he lived. He died fighting for France in the First World War. The Belgian Cyrille van Hauwaert’s victory in the 1908 edition of Paris–Roubaix was therefore the only win by a non-French resident in either race since Fischer’s in 1896 (and even he was racing for a French team). 34 Weber, France, 209. 35 Marinetti, ‘Destruction of Syntax – Untrammeled Imagination – Words-in-Freedom’, translated in Marinetti, Critical Writings, ed. Günter Berghaus, trans. Doug Thompson (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 122. 36 Marinetti, ‘The New Ethical Religion of Speed’, translated in Marinetti, Critical Writings, 255–6. 37 Umberto Boccioni, Futurist Painting Sculpture (Plastic Dynamism), trans. Richard Shane Agin and Maria Elena Vasari (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2016), 63. 38 Flavio Fergonzi, The Mattioli Collection: Masterpieces of the Italian Avant-Garde (Milan: Skira, 2003), 179. 39 See http://www.letour.fr/HISTO/fr/TDF/1913/partants.html for the start list of the 1913 edition (accessed 28 May 2016). Of the 1913 Giro, Bill McGann writes: ‘The peleton was Italian. Not only were there no notable foreign riders; as far as I can see, no foreign riders entered at all’, Bill and Carol McGann, The Story of the Giro d’Italia: A Year-by-Year History of the Tour of Italy, vol. 1: 1909–1970 (Cherokee Village, AR: McGann, 2011), 41. 40 I borrow this phrase from John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988), see 95–102. 41 Boccioni, lecture delivered to the Circolo degli Artisti, Rome, 29 May 1911, quoted in Fergonzi, The Mattioli Collection, 180. 42 Fergonzi, The Mattioli Collection, 181. Fergonzi suggests that Boccioni might have seen the painting at the 1912 Berlin Secession, but the work Feininger showed here was The Velocipedists, not The Bicycle Race, which was first exhibited at the 1913 Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon (see the exhibition history for The Velocipedists in Sotheby’s, ‘Impressionism and Modern Art Evening Sale, London’, 20 June 2005, lot 20, where The Velocipedists is listed as no. 50 in the catalogue for the 1912 Berlin Secession and also the website of The National Gallery, Washington, where the exhibition history for The Bicycle Race begins with the Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon, http://www.nga.gov/ fcgi-bin/tinfo_f?object=66415&detail=exhibit, accessed 28 May 2016). 43 Boccioni asked Severini for reproductions in a letter of 13 March 1913, which I discuss further below. See Fergonzi, The Mattioli Collection, 181 and 189, n. 16. These works by Gleizes and Delaunay will be discussed in the third chapter. 42

The man-machine

44 45 46 47 48

49

50 51

52

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

Fergonzi, The Mattioli Collection, 181. Moser, Jean Metzinger in Retrospect, 43. A charge made by Guillaume Apollinaire in two reviews of the 1910 Salon d’Automne. Boccioni, ‘Futurist Dynamism and French Painting’, translated by J. C. Higgitt in Futurist Manifestos, ed. Umbro Apollonio (Boston: MFA, 2001), 109. The original appeared in Lacerba on 1 August 1913. Boccioni, letter to Gino Severini, 13 March 1913, quoted in Severini, The Life of a Painter, 121–22 (italics in the original). Kahnweiler and Sagot were dealers, Canudo was the editor of Montjoie!, a periodical for which Apollinaire wrote (see below, chapter three). Boccioni, ‘I Futuristi plagiati in Francia’, Archivi Del Futurismo, ed. Maria Drudi Gambillo and Teresa Fiori, vol. 1 (Rome: Da Luca, 1958), 150 (italics in the original). I am grateful to Christopher Adams of the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, London, for his translation of passages from this essay. Boccioni, ‘I Futuristi plagiati in Francia’, 151. Boccioni, ‘Futurist Dynamism and French Painting’, 109. See also a further letter of December 1913 to the German periodical Der Sturm attacking Delaunay, quoted in translation in Robert Wohl, A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1908–1918 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 303, n. 98. Boccioni, ‘Plastic Dynamism’, translated by Robert Brain in Futurist Manifestos, ed. Apollonio, 93 (italics in the original). For Bergson’s use of the terms absolute and relative motion, see his An Introduction to Metaphysics, eds John Mullarkey and Michael Kolkman, trans. T. E. Hulme (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 1–6. Poggi, Inventing Futurism, 173, 174. Éamon Ó. Cofaigh, ‘Motor Sport in France: Testing-ground for the World’, in The History of Motor Sport: A Case Study Analysis, ed. David Hassan (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 6–7. This cup limited nations to three cars each. It was partly because of French discontent with this rule that the ACF devised the grand prix, allowing for much greater competition between the many French manufacturers. Daryl Adair, ‘Spectacles of Speed and Endurance: The Formative Years of Motor Racing in Europe’, The Motor Car and Popular Culture in the 20th Century, ed. Tim Claydon et al. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 120. Adair, ‘Spectacles of Speed’, 126. Amédée Ozenfant, Mémoires 1886–1962 (Paris: Seghers, 1968), 68. F. T. Marinetti, ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’, in Futurism: An Anthology, eds Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi and Laura Wittman, trans. Rainey (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 51. Marinetti, ‘The Founding and Manifesto’, 49. Marinetti, ‘The Founding and Manifesto’, 50. Accounts of Marinetti’s crash are given in Poggi, Inventing Futurism, 7–8 and Jeffrey T. Schnapp, ‘Crash: Speed as Engine of Individuation’, Modernism/Modernity 6, no. 1 (1999), 5–6. Marinetti, ‘The Founding and Manifesto’, 50. F. T. Marinetti, ‘A l’automobile’, Poesia, 7 (August 1905), 11. I quote from the translation in F. T. Marinetti, Selected Poems and Related Prose, ed. Luce Marinetti, trans. Elizabeth R. Napier and Barbara R. Studholme (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 38. This uses Marinetti’s later title, ‘To My Pegasus’. 43

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65 Marinetti, ‘To My Pegasus’, 38. 66 Marinetti, ‘To My Pegasus’, 39. 67 The line reads ‘(BRESCIA, le jour de la Coupe de la Vitesse)’, F. T. Marinetti, ‘La mort tient le volant …’, in his La Ville Charnelle, 8 ed. (Paris: E. Sansot, 1908), 223. 68 Henry Serrano Villard, The Great Road Races, 1894–1914 (London: Arthur Barker, 1972) includes the race in his Appendix, ‘Principal Road Races, 1894–1914’, 234. The race did not take place in 1906. Given the publication date of La Ville Charnelle, Marinetti must be referring to the 1907 race. 69 Details of the Florio Cup from ‘Motor Tragedies, Scenes of Carnage’, Auckland Star, Saturday 19 October 1907, 13. The steering wheel as guillotine is from Marinetti, ‘The Founding and Manifesto’, 49. 70 Trucco’s performance is noted in Villard, The Great Road Races, 157. The quotations are drawn from the account of Marinetti’s crash in the Corriere della Sera, 15 October 1908 and quoted in translation by Schnapp, ‘Crash’, 5. 71 Villard, The Great Road Races, 157. Villard is wrong to put de Martino’s death, the only one over the two days, on the second day. 72 Marinetti, ‘La mort tient le volant …’, 224–5. I quote from the partial translation in Luca Somigli, Legitimizing the Artist: Manifesto Writing and European Modernism, 1885–1915 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 108–9. 73 Marinetti, ‘La mort tient le volant …’, 229, quoted in Somigli, Legitimizing the Artist, 109 (ellipses in Marinetti’s original). 74 Marinetti, ‘La mort tient le volant …’, quoted in Somigli, Legitimizing the Artist, 109. 75 Gustave Fivé, ‘Sports: Mots en liberté’, Lacerba, 1 February 1914, 46. 76 Villard, The Great Road Races, 20. 77 Marinetti, ‘The New Ethical Religion of Speed’, 256. 78 Marinetti, ‘The New Ethical Religion of Speed’, 257–8. 79 Marinetti, ‘The New Ethical Religion of Speed’, 257. 80 Gerald Silk, ‘Automobile’, in Futurism and Futurisms, ed. Pontus Hulten (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 421. 81 Balla’s Racing Automobile, 1913, for example, is identified by Poggi as a Fiat Type 3. Its styling and lack of power means that this is not a competitive car. The Type 3 had just over 30 horse power (hp), whereas Villard, The Great Road Races, 146, states that 130hp was ‘by no means uncommon’ at the first grand prix in 1906. 82 Giovanni Lista, Futurism, trans. Susan Wise (Paris: Terrail, 2001), 56. 83 Poggi, Inventing Futurism, 141. 84 Marinetti, ‘The Founding and Manifesto’, 51. 85 Adair, ‘Spectacles of Speed’, 121. 86 ‘Les Futuristes italiens … faisaient bruyant triomphe à la machine, mais justement pour leur tintamarre, leurs vibrations, leur fumée, leurs étincelles: qui sont précisément des signes de mauvais rendement.’ Ozenfant, Mémoires, 73. 87 ‘l’ingéniosité française avait été battue par la préparation et l’organisation méthodique des allemands … Cette leçon de planning et de bonne exécution me frappa énormément – et je me promis de suivre cet exemple dans mes tableaux et dans ma vie.’ Ozenfant, Mémoires, 77–8. 88 Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, trans. John Goodman (London: Frances Lincoln, 2008), 190–1. This follows the infamous juxtapositions on 180–1. 89 Le Corbusier-Saugnier, ‘Les yeux qui ne voient pas… III: Les autos’, L’Esprit Nouveau 10 (1921), 1139–51. 44

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90 The photomontage appeared in Vauvrecy (a pseudonym used by both Ozenfant and Le Corbusier), ‘Ephémérides’, L’Esprit Nouveau 27 (1924), n.p. The line drawings appeared as ‘Evolution des formes de l’automobile’, L’Esprit Nouveau 13 (1921), 1570–1. 91 See L. J. K. Setright, The Pirelli History of Motor Sport (London: Frederick Muller, 1981), 96, where Mephistopheles is described as ‘one of Fiat’s biggest old bangers’, alongside a cropped version of the photograph Le Corbusier uses. 92 Dr St-Quentin [pseud. Amédée Ozenfant], ‘Sports’, L’Esprit Nouveau 11–12 (1921), 1365: ‘La suppression des courses pendant la guerre et dans l’année qui suivit l’armistice nous a gratifié de monstres automobiles qui sont en nette régression sur les voitures de sport d’avant la guerre.’ 93 Robert Dick, Auto Racing Comes of Age: A Transatlantic View of the Cars, Drivers and Speedways, 1900–1925 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013), 253. 94 For more on Graeff, see (ed.) Gerda Breuer, Werner Graeff, 1901–1978: Die Künstleringenieur (Berlin: Jovis, 2010). The design gained wider exposure when another motoring enthusiast, Reyner Banham, included it in his seminal Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, 2 ed. (Oxford: Architectural Press, 1962), figure 69. 95 This unsigned editorial was probably written by Richter and Graeff. See G 1 (July 1923), n.p., translated in G: An Avant-Garde Journal of Art, Architecture, Design, and Film, 1923–1926, eds Detlef Mertins and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Steven Lindberg and Margareta Ingrid Christian (London: Tate, 2011), 101. 96 The two essays are translated in G: An Avant-Garde Journal, 130–2 and 168–9. 97 Werner Graeff, ‘Most German Cars Have Pointed Radiators: You are partly to blame!’, in G: An Avant-Garde Journal of Art, Architecture, Design, and Film, 1923–1926, eds Detlef Mertins and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Steven Lindberg and Margareta Ingrid Christian (London: Tate, 2011), 168. 98 I am extremely grateful to Max Firman, an aerodynamicist with experience of working in Formula 1, for confirming to me that Graeff’s principles hold up relatively well. Limitations include Graeff’s postulation of an airflow always perpendicular to the radiator and his ignorance of the Meredith effect (discovered in the 1930s), whereby heated air that has passed through the radiator can then be used to contribute to the thrust of the vehicle. Max Firman, e-mail to the author, 25 January 2015. 99 Graeff, ‘Radiators’, 169.

45

2 Adversarial modernisms: the spectacle of boxing and the geometry of tennis

At first glance the worlds of tennis and boxing are about as far removed as one could possibly imagine. Although there is some truth to this initial impression, there are also some surprising similarities. Most obviously they are normally sports where the competition is between individuals rather than teams. But beyond this, in the early twentieth century, they were among the most internationalised of modern sports, with boxers and tennis players routinely crossing oceans to compete. In Europe, and in Paris in particular, boxing was perceived as an American sport and, despite its image as a working-class sport, it was enjoying a vogue amongst the upper-middle classes and the aristocracy. These classes had long been interested in tennis. In the 1920s, and especially after the rise to prominence of Helen Wills as the dominant player in the women’s game, tennis also became associated with Americanism. This chapter looks firstly at the boxing match between proto-Dada figure Arthur Cravan and the world’s most famous boxer before the First World War, Jack Johnson. Le Corbusier included a photograph of a boxing match in The Decorative Art of Today, but tennis was also of interest to him.1 In the second half of the chapter I look at the photograph of a tennis match he included in The City of Tomorrow and its Planning, situating it not just within the context of L’Esprit Nouveau’s interest in sport, which I began to examine in the previous chapter, but also in the wider context of the literature on modernist architecture, where Le Corbusier’s focus on tennis is just one of several examples. Noble Art? Arthur Cravan versus Jack Johnson Of the range of possible identifications between artists and sportsmen, that with the boxer is the most pervasive. As far back as 1880, impressionist Gustave Caillebotte was photographed stripped to the waist and bare-knuckle fighting. Pablo Picasso was, according to his lover Fernande Olivier, ‘attracted to boxing. He enjoyed going to fights and used to follow them keenly. He would have liked 46

Adversarial modernisms

to box himself, but he hated being hit, though he liked the idea of dispensing blows himself.’2 Olivier also recalled that: ‘He was affected by the beauty of a fight as by a work of art. He liked boxers as much as he liked clowns, but differently. They seemed to awe him. He would have been proud to make friends with a boxer.’3 In a small sense, he was friends with a fighter; Georges Braque was an amateur boxer, sufficiently dedicated to have himself photographed in gloves and trunks with his guard up (figure 9). In his profile of Braque, André Salmon revealed that ‘every morning, before beginning to paint, he gets a hand in at the punching bag’.4 According to Olivier, André Derain too boxed. The one lesson he gave Picasso was ‘enough to last a lifetime’.5 In England, the vorticists included several fighters in the list of people that they ‘BLESSED’ in the first issue of their magazine Blast.6 A still from the lost film Vita Futurista shows futurist leader F. T. Marinetti wearing boxing gloves and an evening suit to illustrate morning gymnastics. The reasons behind these identifications are not hard to imagine. As Tamar Garb argues in relation to Caillebotte, boxing had been promoted as an ‘aristocratic sport in nineteenth-century France by a number of important literary figures … [but] was still widely regarded as a plebeian pastime, associated with the popular entertainments of fairgrounds, public spectacles and brute force’.7 In the same way that many artists were fascinated by music hall performance, or circus, boxing was a mass spectacle which also incorporated a certain frisson of outsider appeal. The addition to the blend of a mixture of aristocratic and literary connotations meant that it could at once be viewed as high art and mass culture, as Picasso seems to have done. After the First World War, Querschnitt, the journal established by art dealer Alfred Flechtheim, wrote that: ‘We consider it our duty to promote boxing in German artistic circles as has long been the case elsewhere. In Paris Braque, Derain, Dufy, Matisse, Picasso and Rodin are all enthusiastic boxing fans.’8 This commitment was carried through, with boxers frequently illustrated in and occasionally writing for the journal as an element of what David Bathrick has described as ‘the nexus between modernity and Americanism which for many left wing Weimar avant-gardists empowered sports (six-day bicycle races, boxing, etc.) as a means to subvert 19th-century Wilhelminian culture’.9 In America itself, the journal The Soil devoted as much time to boxing matches as it did to Oscar Wilde or Paul Cézanne, and Robert Alden Sanborn concluded his account of the atmosphere at a boxing match there with the claim: ‘We are making pictures, we are making art history, and we don’t know it and don’t want to know it because we are too full of life.’10 That The Soil displayed a lively interest in boxing and that it was American was not a coincidence. More than any other sport in Europe, boxing was associated with Americanism. Although scholarship has tended to focus on the effects of this on the Weimar Republic, Querschnitt’s article reveals that the Germans were looking at the intersection of boxing and art already present in France, and here too, even before the Great War, boxing and Americanism were strongly linked. The great French heavyweight Georges Carpentier wrote that from 1908 ‘Paris 47

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9  Georges Braque in boxing gloves and trunks, c. 1911

48

Adversarial modernisms

experienced a veritable invasion of American boxers, suddenly making the “noble art” more popular than it had ever been in France’.11 Fighters in Europe began to be accorded the sort of celebrity that they enjoyed in America. Even so, The Soil’s profile of the English émigré boxer Ted ‘Kid’ Lewis opened with his observation that: ‘There is a difference between boxers here and in England; in England a boxer is looked upon as a professional, but there is greater respect shown them here. They make an idol of a boxer overnight in this country.’12 Perhaps with such strong identifications between artist and sportsman, a mass-spectacle sport and a growing cult of celebrity around individual boxers, the surprise is not that avant-garde artists were sufficiently attracted to the sport to have themselves photographed as boxers, but that more major works taking boxing as a theme do not exist. The youngest of the vorticists, William Roberts, actually featured an advertisement for a Kid Lewis bout in the background of his large-scale drawing Boxers, 1914 (figure 10).13 The futurist Carlo Carrà produced a charcoal drawing, Boxer, the previous year (figure 11) as well as Force Centres of a Boxer. Fighters feature regularly in collages by Erwin Blumenfeld, Gustav Klucis (one of the Spartakiada works, to be discussed in chapter four), the Swedish constructivist GAN (Göstra Adrian Nilsson), as well as varied works by Wyndham Lewis, Sandor Bortnyik and George Grosz, who painted the German champion Max Schmeling and supposedly fought his fellow Dada artist John Heartfield.14 André Dunoyer de Segonzac exhibited Boxers at the 1911 Salon d’Automne, Alexander Archipenko showed a sculpture, Boxing, at the Indépendants in 1914. Picasso made a couple of drawings in the winter of 1911–12, but his painting The Boxer, a complex analytic cubist work, seems to have been misleadingly titled.15 There is nothing in European painting that has acquired the stature of the series of works that the American George Bellows devoted to the sport. The poet and boxer Arthur Cravan There is, however, one extraordinary event. It is not a painting and it is uncertain whether it is best viewed as art or sport. It concerns the shadowy figure of Arthur Cravan. Cravan is principally known for five things: firstly, he was married to the poet Mina Loy; secondly, he was the editor and sole writer (under a string of pseudonyms) of a scandalous Parisian proto-Dada journal, Maintenant, for two years between 1912 and 1914; thirdly, he was a notorious faker (real name Fabian Lloyd), which makes the details of his life even harder to track down. He disappeared for good in November 1918 off the coast Santa Cruz, Mexico, having set sail to join Loy in Buenos Aires, but rumours persist that he lived on under an assumed identity. Fourthly, he was a member of Dada, being included in Tristan Tzara’s list of ‘Dada Presidents’ in the sixth issue of Dada magazine and mixing with Francis Picabia’s circle. As Willard Bohn writes, ‘his life is best seen as the ultimate Dada gesture’.16 Finally – and this much is certain – he was the only avant-garde figure to have fought world champion and heavyweight great Jack Johnson. The fight took place on Sunday 23 April 1916 in Barcelona. 49

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10  William Roberts, Boxers, 1914

Despite seemingly painting a few works under the pseudonym Edouard Archinard, some of which were shown at the same Bernheim-Jeune gallery where the futurists staged their first Parisian exhibition, Cravan was not in any conventional sense a visual artist. Rather, he described himself as a Poet and Boxer. His real contribution to avant-garde culture was two-fold. He was the organiser of ‘conferences’, publicised events in which people would be brought together and subject to provocations with unpredictable results. These, as with the contemporary futurist serate and later Dada soirées, served as models for ‘happenings’ and performance pieces later in the century. Secondly, Maintenant was an important journal for periodical culture both in France and beyond. In the case of The Soil 50

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11  Carlo Carrà, Boxer, 1913

this was quite literal. As I will discuss, Cravan featured heavily in the American journal, which also reprinted material from Maintenant. The magazine, with its violent attacks, private jokes and bold claims, was described by Gabrielle BuffetPicabia as ‘certainly the forerunner of 391 and other aggressive post-war publications’.17 Cravan’s scabrous review of the Salon des Indépendants of 1914 was so inflammatory that a gang of offended painters waited to try to assault him and Guillaume Apollinaire challenged him to a duel.18 During that piece, Cravan mentioned, tongue-in-cheek, that he would have submitted a work of his own, The World Champion in the Brothel, if it had not been for a bout of laziness.19 As his multifarious activities demonstrate, Cravan was anything but lazy. But his activities were not directed towards painting but, rather, action. Nevertheless, his spoof title is revealing, for the heavyweight champion of the time was Jack Johnson and Cravan puts him into a position of a sexual athlete frequenting the brothels that were also a familiar trope in artistic circles. Testifying to the close connection between artistic figures and boxers at this point, one advertisement in Maintenant advises those in search of poets and boxers, as well as pimps, to dine at the restaurant chez Jourdan.20 Nevertheless, as Roger Conover points out, ‘Cravan is surely the only boxer in the history of the sport to have praised Jack 51

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Johnson and Oscar Wilde as twin heroes.’21 Cravan and Johnson were finally brought together in Barcelona by international forces: Cravan was fleeing the war and possible conscription by the British army (he was born in Lausanne, Switzerland, but to British parents). In close contact with Robert Delaunay, he found his way to neutral Spain and the Barcelona Dada group led by Picabia. His adversary, although how much of an adversary will be considered below, was also in flight and exile. Johnson (figure 12), heavyweight champion from 1908 to 1915, is one of the greats in the pantheon of boxing. In many ways a precursor to Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson, he similarly captivated and enervated large swathes of American society. He was the first African-American to get a shot at the world heavyweight title. On 4 July 1910, two years after he won that fight, he defended the title against the white challenger Jim Jeffries. Johnson’s victory sparked race riots and lynchings in cities across the US which resulted in over twenty deaths. He had three white wives and a string of white girlfriends. He also had a strong anti-authoritarian streak. Stopped by a traffic policeman for speeding, he was told that the fine would be fifty dollars. Johnson handed the cop a hundred dollar bill and restarted his engine. He was asked if he wanted his change. ‘Keep it’, replied Johnson, ‘cause I’m coming back the same way.’22 The authorities were suitably angered by such provocations: ‘Unable to dislodge Johnson in the ring’, writes Steven A. Riess, ‘white Americans went after the champion in court. The federal government hounded Johnson for his sexual escapades and in 1913 convicted him of violating the Mann Act by transporting a woman across state lines for immoral purposes. He fled the country and spent the rest of his championship abroad.’23 His exile coincided with the boxing booms in England and France, and he spent time in both London and Paris, where he already enjoyed celebrity status, publishing his first autobiography, Ma vie et mes combats, in French.24 It is worth noting that boxing at this point held a broad appeal across both class and gender. When he fought Frank Moran in Paris in June 1914, Johnson did so in front of several titled European ladies.25 Although he was to lose his title in 1915 he was still billed on the poster for the Cravan bout as the world champion, a fight which, although he was now thirty-nine and out of shape, he was certain to win. But, although obviously not in Johnson’s class, Cravan was no mug (figure 13). In February 1910 he had won his division of the annual championship of amateur boxers and the following month had become the amateur light-heavyweight champion of France, albeit through what Conover calls a ‘bizarre series of defaults, disqualifications, and withdrawals on the part of his opponents’.26 He was not the ‘European champion’ promised on the poster for the fight; he was not even a credible contender, but he could box and was built like a boxer. The fight was no great physical mismatch, Cravan weighed in five kilograms (about twelve pounds) lighter than the overweight Johnson. But Cravan was in every sense an unorthodox boxer: ‘When he stepped into the ring, he invariably announced himself as the “Poet and Boxer Arthur Cravan,” as if dividing himself into two. 52

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12  Photograph of Jack Johnson from The Soil, number 2, 1917

53

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13  Arthur Cravan in training in Barcelona, 1916

This was usually followed by a long string of other pedigrees (hotel thief, snakecharmer, grandson of the Queen’s Chancellor, nephew of Oscar Wilde, poet with the shortest haircut in the world …) which must have seemed equally incongruous to ringside observers.’27 But if Cravan did ‘divide himself in two’, then this division was not impermeable. For Cravan, poetry and boxing came close to being interchangeable. Conover writes that, compared to his boxing, ‘his poems and essays were secondary aspirations – but in their gestural sweep and postural fix they can also be read as bodily manifestations, lines delivered or speech executed like ring-exercises, by-products of a body always in motion – crossing borders, slicing sensibilities, murdering reputations, knocking heads … the knock-out instinct dominated his critique’.28 54

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He even trained in the studio of the painter Kees van Dongen. Picabia’s wife, Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, herself a Dada presidentess, claims that Cravan preferred the company of boxers and that he ‘was prouder of his athletic performances than of his literary works’.29 But poetry was perhaps not merely a secondary aspiration: when Cravan entered the ring it was as a poet first and a boxer second. It is as if when boxing Cravan wished to be a poet – none of his entrance credentials relate to boxing, and two of them, ‘being a nephew of Oscar Wilde’ (true, incidentally) and being the ‘poet with the shortest haircut in the world’ are explicitly literary. Nor does boxing emerge as a stable category for Cravan. In his satiric ‘To Be Or Not To Be … American’, written for the French sports newspaper L’Echo des Sports, he writes that: ‘Caps with outrageous peaks are tolerable only for boxers or those who wish to pass as such, which is exactly the same thing.’30 On the other hand, as a writer he brings the belligerence of the ring to bear on his opponents. Cravan used Maintenant as ‘his personal loudspeaker to attack those who didn’t attack him, to advertise his friends’ cafés, to bring down artists’ reputations, to vent his wrath on the public, to publish his poems and to praise his unlikely heroes’.31 One of those heroes was Johnson himself: ‘After Poe, Whitman and Emerson, he is the most glorious American’, Cravan said, closing an interview about the fight published in The Soil the following year.32 An educated man, often to the surprise of his interviewers, Johnson had literary connections. His second autobiography, with a foreword by Damon Runyan, is an erudite account of an archetypal rags-to-riches tale, interspersed with fast cars, fast women, nightclub ownership, theatrical performances, governmental hounding and being the target of Zeppelin raids in London during the First World War. If Cravan is a ‘poet and boxer’, then Johnson has claims to be a ‘boxer and poet’. In her analysis of boxing and Americanism, Kasia Boddy again concentrates on Weimar Germany, but notes that those ‘pursuing Americanism in Berlin always felt themselves a step behind what was going on in Paris’, in doing so drawing a telling distinction between Berliners, who hoped America would provide salvation from an economic and spiritual crisis, and Parisians, who, as Boddy quotes Antonio Gramsci, ‘treated Americanism “merely as a form of make-up, a superficial foreign fashion” ’.33 Johnson was attuned to cash in on this. As I discuss below, he appeared not just in the ring and the press but also on the Parisian stage. After losing his title in 1915, Johnson had also written and starred in a stage revue, Seconds Out, which ran in London until early 1916, when he left for Spain ‘having been tendered inducements by theatrical promoters’.34 Cravan, too, had a keen sense of the way in which boxing could be mixed with theatre, promoting his own dancing and boxing ‘conferences’ at which, according to The Chicago Tribune, he would ‘talk, box and dance a novel boxing dance, assisted by numerous other eccentrics – including negroes, boxers and dancers’.35 It makes sense, then, when Conover writes that: ‘The Johnson/Cravan face-off was as much a collaboration as a contest’, although he gives rather prosaic reasons for viewing it in this way: ‘both knew they could draw a crowd. Johnson needed 55

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a fight, and Cravan needed a percentage of the gate in order to make his next port of call, New York.’36 I think the collaboration goes somewhat deeper than that. It was as much spectacle as contest, as much theatrical event as boxing match. Conover writes that Cravan ‘launched a massive publicity campaign to give credibility to his challenge to the former world heavyweight champion’. This was not the first time that Cravan had launched such a campaign. Back in Paris he had already filled a theatre by announcing that he would commit suicide on stage. The performance itself rested on frustrating expectations, as Cravan rounded on his audience, taking them to task for making a social ritual of death. How much of these frustrated expectations and exposure of social ritual can we find in the fight with Johnson? To what degree does this event capitalise not only on the sporting abilities of the two protagonists, but also on their considerable theatrical and promotional acumen? Johnson, for his part, was about to launch an advertising agency in Barcelona, exploiting his ‘extensive use of publicity in the theatrical and boxing world’.37 Together, ‘Cravan and Johnson had set the scene for a fight whose execution could never equal its hype’.38 Cravan–Johnson As befits Cravan, the accounts of the fight itself are shot through with inconsistencies. Everyone agrees that Johnson was the victor and everyone agrees that he knocked Cravan out. But the accounts from there on differ wildly, starting with the protagonists themselves. In The Soil Cravan said that it ‘went seven rounds’.39 In his autobiography Johnson stated, ‘I knocked him out in the first round’.40 Blaise Cendrars offers the most graphic account of the fight and writes that Cravan was knocked out within a minute after Johnson was reduced to kicking his opponent three times in a bid to get him to stop trembling and fight. Cendrars then has Johnson enflaming the crowd and a riot taking place, with Johnson being taken into police custody for his own safety and the crowd being reimbursed. However, Cendrars’s tale is, by his own admission, second hand and is littered with errors.41 Another Dada president, Hans Richter, agrees that Cravan was knocked down in the first, but places the fight in Madrid.42 Buffet-Picabia recalled that, ‘in anticipation of the inevitable result’, Cravan had entered the ring ‘reeling drunk’.43 The author of Boxing’s Strangest Fights quotes Cendrars’s account, but inaccurately states that Cravan had never been in a ring before.44 Conover, the foremost authority on Cravan, claims that the fight lasted a ‘pathetic six rounds’ and settled the dispute by referring to Spanish newspaper reports of the bout.45 This would mean that Cravan actually did rather better than some of Johnson’s more illustrious challengers. However, that the fight lasted as long as it did was not a testament to Cravan’s boxing ability. The front-page report of the fight in El Mundo Deportivo, a Barcelona-based sports newspaper, makes clear that it was an evident mismatch, writing of the contest as ‘a real disgrace’ and calling its length ‘ridiculous’, claiming that without a gentleman’s agreement Cravan would surely have been knocked out in the first.46 Perhaps the 56

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most plausible explanation for that agreement is provided by Kasia Boddy, who claims that the fight ‘only continued until the sixth round because, as part of the deal, they needed to put on a good show for the film cameras’.47 Although, of course, establishing the historical record, what actually happened, is important to understanding the contest, it is also vital to acknowledge that these scattered and contradictory stories are also the legacy of the fight and part of the Cravan myth. By the time he arrived in America, Loy recalled, ‘the legends surrounding him were so extravagant that the very idea of encountering him frightened me. … I would have preferred to forego the almost imperative ritual of meeting him, but “haven’t you met the prizefighter who writes poetry?” assailed me on all sides’.48 The first of these accounts is the one given by Cravan himself in the interview with The Soil. That journal is often portrayed as concerned with establishing an autonomous American modernist aesthetic, largely thanks to Robert J. Coady’s manifesto, ‘American Art’, spread over two parts in the first two issues. In a long list of characteristically American experiences, Coady names The Boxing Record, the Sporting Pages, ‘Madison Square Garden on a fight night. The Runners, the Jumpers, the Swimmers, the Boxers’ as part of American Art.49 In the second issue he claims that ‘Our art is, as yet, outside of our art world. … It’s coming from the ball field, the stadium and the ring’.50 However, although Coady was effectively in control of the journal and acted as its art editor, Jay Bochner has proposed that it is Cravan who is ‘its main voice and model hero’ and the ‘whole life of the magazine appears to be circumscribed by his presence’.51 The publication (five issues between December 1916 and July 1917) dovetails neatly with the time that Cravan spent in New York. Bringing with him his admiration of America, his love of boxing, his knowledge of Wilde and his success in stirring up scandal with Maintenant, Cravan is a constant presence, publishing two poems in the first issue, the second a hymn to New York previously published in the first issue of Maintenant. A full-page photograph of Johnson is featured in the second issue, along with the first of Sanborn’s boxing reports and the profile of Kid Lewis. Boxing also features in the third issue, with Sanborn’s account of the boxing matches at the Armory A.A. The fifth and final issue contains an acerbic review of artists at the newly founded Society of Independent Artists, an unstated homage to Cravan’s own vitriolic estimation of the 1914 Salon des Indépendants in Maintenant, the publication of which, according to the New York Times, forced Cravan to cancel one of his ‘boxing and dancing “conferences” ’ in a Montmartre café to avoid artists seeking retribution.52 This last issue also concludes the translation of the notorious Maintenant essay ‘Oscar Wilde is Alive’, the first part of which had been published in issue four. That issue was extensively devoted to Cravan, also including unpublished Wildean correspondence and ‘Wilde’s Personal Appearance’ (allegedly written by Wilde’s sister-in-law, i.e. Cravan’s mother). This precedes ‘Arthur Cravan vs. Jack Johnson’, but between the material on Wilde and the account of the fight is a rather remarkable full-page photographic portrait of Cravan which seems intent on portraying him not as a boxer but as 57

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a poet (figure 14). Dressed in a three-piece tweed suit complete with silk handkerchief tucked into his breast pocket, Cravan also sports a pair of spotted silk socks as he sits on a settee or divan behind which is hung a tapestry. On his lap are a pair of Siamese kittens which he fondles protectively as he gazes, doe-eyed, into the camera. Loy’s first impressions of Cravan were based on this photograph, in which she felt ‘a certain sleekness of feature gave him the air of a homosexual’ and that he was possessed of a mind which ‘deals in values of luxury’.53 As a picture prefacing an account of a boxing match with one of the greatest fighters on the planet, it is designed to disrupt expectations. Only a couple of pages later, Cravan has traversed his complex identity as another photograph, this time of the fight itself, concludes the account (figure 15). It is clear from the photograph that the fight was very well attended. Cendrars writes of a riot or disturbance following the fight, with fires being started and the crowd attempting to storm the ring. This seems unlikely: Cravan makes no mention of it in The Soil, nor does Johnson in his autobiography, and if the Spanish press reported crowd unrest in their accounts of the fight, then Conover does not refer to it. Nevertheless, such scenes are familiar to readers of accounts of Dada evenings. As Peter Nicholls writes of Tristan Tzara, ‘the performance is above all a catalyst leading to violence’, but one that is achieved through taunting and abusing the audience ‘to such a degree that it is finally driven into a frenzy of anger and outrage’.54 Tzara recalls in his ‘Zurich Chronicle’ that ‘the people protest shout smash windowpanes kill each other demolish fight here come the police interruption’, following which, ‘Boxing resumed’.55 In the first issue of Maintenant, below an announcement of a ‘beautiful’ boxing match between Carpentier and the black boxer Gunther, and in reference to Marinetti’s voluble promotion of the futurist movement, Cravan stated that ‘glory is a scandal’.56 He told The Soil that he liked Johnson because ‘he’s a man of scandal … anything that has to do with Johnson has to do with a crowd of policemen’. He also revealed that the pair had met briefly before the Barcelona match, when Johnson had punched him in a Parisian nightclub ‘and the thing ended with the whole crowd jumping in’.57 Such scenes are also not uncommon in boxing. But where riots occur in boxing matches it tends to be as a result not of provocation, but of frustrated expectations, a fight over too quickly, or the suggestion that it is staged. Ordinarily, for Norbert Elias, the boxing match is not at all a ‘catalyst leading to violence’ but represents a step towards civilisation: belligerence and aggression find socially permitted expression in sporting contests … and they are expressed especially in ‘spectating’ (e.g., at boxing matches), in the imaginary identification with a small number of combatants to whom moderate and precisely regulated scope is granted for the release of such affects. And this living-out of affects in spectating or even in merely listening (e.g., to a radio commentary) is a particularly characteristic feature of civilized society … This transformation of what manifested itself originally as an active, often aggressive expression of pleasure, into the passive, more ordered pleasure of spectating is already initiated in education … The boxing match to mention only one example, 58

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14  Arthur Cravan photographed c. 1914 and published in The Soil, number 4, 1917

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15  The Johnson–Cravan fight in Barcelona, 1916. Published in The Soil, number 4, 1917

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represents a strongly tempered form of the impulses of aggressiveness and cruelty, compared with the visual pleasures of earlier stages.58

One of the aspects of what Elias terms ‘The Civilizing Process’ is, then, this conversion of aggression into passivity through identification with a combatant granted reduced scope for the exercise by proxy of that aggression. The theory seems a limited one. It might work if the contestants were evenly matched and evenly popular, but the lynchings that followed news of Johnson’s victory over Jeffries in 1910 demonstrate that ‘imaginary identification’ does not always result in passivity and can extend well beyond the duration of the bout; cinema footage of that fight was banned in Washington DC, Boston, Cincinnati and Atlanta, with the capital’s police chief fearing that the film would ‘renew the hostile feeling on the part of many white men’, before Congress banned the interstate transport of fight films.59 The racial situation in Europe was much less incendiary, although a poster for the fight does make a point of contrasting the skin colour of the two fighters. In France, black boxers had been viewed with curiosity, rather than enmity. Johnson’s biographer, Geoffrey C. Ward, records how, in the spring of 1911, ‘the French press was filled with overwrought stories about black American heavyweights – their power and dark skin and supposed exoticism’, which paved the way for Johnson’s first visit to Paris.60 But Cravan was also surely aware that Johnson had taken part in what Ward calls ‘staged wrestling matches at a Montmartre music hall called the Nouveau Cirque. His opponents – the “Great Uhrbach” from Germany; André Sproul, the “Savage Siberian”; and a Scot named Jimmy Esson – didn’t matter much. Crowds came to see Jack Johnson lose his temper at their wicked tactics and lay them out with a choreographed roundhouse swing. By the third match, some people had seen through the theatrics and began pelting the ring with vegetables’.61 This is a spectacle that would certainly have appealed to Cravan and its transfer to a fight promoted as a genuine heavyweight contest in front of a crowd of thousands would have an unpredictable aspect to it. The accounts of the fight differ on whether and to what extent it was choreographed. In his interview for The Soil, Cravan played it straight, giving a measured assessment of Johnson’s fighting skills. At one point he does say that the pair laughed at one another and Cravan says ‘I knew that I was to be beaten’, but that might not refer to a fixed fight, but simply to the realisation either before or during the fight that Johnson, who routinely goaded his opponents, was by far the superior boxer. Whether the fight was choreographed or not, the important factor might be the evident mismatch. If Elias’s theory relies on two evenly matched adversaries, then the amateur, possibly drunk, Cravan was not a serious combatant for Johnson and never could have been. His Dadaist tactic relies not on enflaming the crowd through agitation, but on frustrating its expectations. In boxing it is when the process to release belligerence and aggression through spectating miscarries that riots ensue. For a man whose hallmark was to assemble a large crowd together and to provoke, disappoint or enrage them, as he had done for his ‘suicide’ in Paris and as he was to do again in New York, when he began undressing 61

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while lecturing to an audience at the Society of Independents exhibition, the boxing match with Johnson could be regarded as the most spectacular of his misadventures. Those frustrated identifications reveal the fragility of that civilising process: Cravan claimed, ‘let me state once and for all: I do not want to be civilized’.62 Cravan once noted that ‘I am enough of a brute to give myself a smack in the teeth and subtle to the point of neurasthenia’, anticipating the conclusion of one of Tzara’s manifestos: ‘Punch yourself in the face and drop dead’.63 In fighting against Johnson, Cravan was indeed punching himself. More than anything else discussed in this book, his fight against Johnson blurs the boundaries between sport and art, between performance as generally understood in a sporting sense – something measured in relation to the athlete’s potential – and performance understood in an artistic or theatrical sense of a series of actions staged for onlookers. Whether Cravan’s performance (of either kind) was good or bad, whether the fight lasted one round, or six, or seven, whether the fight was choreographed or staged and, if so, whether this means that it passes into the realm of art and theatre, or becomes simply bad sport, or not sport at all, all these are valid questions, but ultimately it is possible that Cravan was aware that in the early twentieth century the lines between artistic self-promotion, theatre, advertising, spectacle and boxing could be easily traversed, and that for around twenty minutes in a bull ring in Barcelona on 23 April 1916 he negotiated them with sufficient skill to be poet and boxer simultaneously. Tennis What are we to make of Le Corbusier’s inclusion of a photograph of men’s singles tennis match in his The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning (figure 16)?64 This is not the only time that the architect uses a sporting image to illustrate a point of design; The Decorative Art of Today contains a similarly enigmatic boxing match amongst its illustrations. L’Esprit Nouveau, the periodical that Le Corbusier ran from 1920 to 1925 with Amédée Ozenfant and which contained source material for both books, signalled its interest in ‘Les Sports’ by including the term on it masthead. Le Corbusier took great pains over the choice and placement of the photographs in his printed works. They were rarely simply illustrative, as he claimed in publicity for the earlier Toward An Architecture, also drawn from work for L’Esprit Nouveau, that the ‘magnificent illustrations hold next to the text a parallel discourse, and one of great power’.65 This means that the photograph of the tennis match takes its place in a chain of images, but it also means that, as Roland Barthes famously pointed out, we need to examine what the photograph connotes; what does the incorporation of a tennis player in a book on architecture signal in the middle of the 1920s (for, as we will see, Le Corbusier’s is not the only example)?66 As a starting point, it is worth noting that tennis was unusual in that women participated in large numbers both at a recreational level and at the summit of the game. 62

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16  Photograph from Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning, 1925

Even though the photograph shows two male players, this might yet have a bearing on Le Corbusier’s selection of it. Secondly, tennis was a sport whose competitors were drawn largely from a relatively affluent sector of society and L’Esprit Nouveau had pronounced itself a journal for elites.67 That tennis was elitist and that it was open to both sexes might be more than a coincidence. Richard Holt believes that in France, ‘[t]ennis was the only modern sport in which the sexes could meet easily, and mixed doubles was a unique and useful form of introduction which figured prominently in the social experience of middle-class teenagers from the turn of the century onwards. Mothers were just beginning to take their daughters to tennis parties, “just as they had formally escorted them to the ball”.’68 The game had been imported from England during the 1880s and was played at the most fashionable sports clubs in France, such as Racing Club de Paris and Stade Français. ‘In these clubs and their imitators the status of prospective members was carefully screened in an attempt to ensure the “right sort” of boy met the “right sort” of girl.’69 There was a commitment to amateurism. The first Wimbledon tournament, in 1879, actually cost competitors a guinea to enter and that in itself was significant, since a guinea (twenty-one shillings) was a unit of currency used ‘in place of the mundane pound to state professional fees, rents for better premises, and similarly impressive purposes’.70 As with many other sports, however, the stipulation on amateurism was overdetermined by questions of class: ‘By their insistence on a competitor’s amateur status, the hosts of a tournament did not, however, envisage an amateur in the modern sense of the term. What seemed desirable was the competitor’s allegiance to a particular class … The obligatory reference in the programme to the amateur status of the competitors indicated within what social layers lawn tennis had taken its roots in the 1870s.’71 But women were not simply there to make up the 63

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numbers for a mixed doubles match. Intercollegiate doubles matches started at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge in 1878. The first Ladies Championships were held in 1884. Women’s participation, although accepted, gave rise to anxieties, evident in a passage from a book written in 1898 by the Secretary of the Lawn Tennis Association, the body which governed the sport in England: Among the manifold changes and consequent uprootings of prejudices which the latter half of this century has witnessed, nothing has been more characteristic of the new order of things than the active participation of women in sports and pastimes … Lawn Tennis must claim a large share of the responsibility for the introduction of the new regime. … And although the present movement may be (and undoubtedly is) often carried to excess, and the athleticism of the finde-siècle woman appears sometimes too pronounced, still it cannot be denied that on the whole the changes which have been brought about must ultimately prove beneficial to the race at large – at all events physically.72

By the time that Le Corbusier included his photograph, tennis had evolved into a mass spectator sport, with associations of glamour and internationalism. The international Davis Cup competition had been established in 1900, and in 1923 the major US, English and French tournaments were confirmed as the Grand Slam, with players crossing the Channel or the Atlantic in order to compete, so much so that Barry Smart believes that: ‘In the 1920s tennis was the most international of organised sports.’73 International travel added a further element of sophistication to the air of elite sport that tennis retained, despite the large crowds that now watched the matches. The purist view of tennis Le Corbusier’s photograph comes in a section of The City of Tomorrow titled ‘Order’. The section has as its epigraph the claim that: ‘The right angle is the essential and sufficient implement of action, because it enables us to determine space with an absolute exactness.’74 Developing his argument, Le Corbusier claims that the right angle has ‘superior rights over other angles’ because it is ‘unique and constant’.75 In La Peinture Moderne (Modern Painting), never translated into English, Ozenfant and Le Corbusier devoted a whole section to the right angle and termed it ‘one of the symbols of perfection’.76 A tennis court, seen in plan (with the net as a two-dimensional line) has forty-eight right angles, an astonishing number, given the small playing area relative to many sports. Further, the tennis court’s right angles form nesting rectangles within rectangles, making it more complex than, for example, an American football pitch. If Le Corbusier had been aware of the history of the sport he would have known that in the 1870s the game was played on so-called ‘hour-glass’ courts, where the playing area narrowed towards the net and expanded again on the other side of it, so that, although all court markings were straight lines, there were only eight right angles. Establishing parallel sidelines, followed by the superimposition of the doubles court onto the 64

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singles court in 1882, allowing both variations of the game to be played in one space, dramatically increased the number of right angles. In other words, the development of the tennis court provides just the sort of move towards standardisation and simplification that Le Corbusier admired in other areas, such as motor-car design or aviation. The photograph is implicitly connected to the two images that immediately precede it: shots of racing cars climbing winding roads up mountains, presumably on a hill climb or a rally (the number ninety-six is clearly visible on the second of the photographs).77 All three were added by Le Corbusier to ‘Order’ as published in L’Esprit Nouveau and, both in their photographic form and sporting subject, they represent the most modern illustrations in this section of the book. Although initially one might suppose that the winding road is being contrasted in a negative way with the straight lines and right angles of the tennis court, given that we have seen Le Corbusier’s enthusiasm for the racing car we might suspect that this is only part of the story. Indeed, the photograph illustrates a point made in the text: ‘And if, on the most precipitous mountain, we construct a road climbing to a pass, that also has a clear geometric function and its windings are an exact and precise thing amid the surrounding chaos.’78 These two photographs imply a solution to a specific problem; the first shows a car ascending a winding road, in the second the car now appears to have completed its twisting ascent and the road has served its purpose. The winding road and the lack of right angles, the text seems to suggest, are justified by the peculiar topography of the mountainside. Assuming a level site, such as a tennis court, straight lines and right angles are not simply preferable, but morally necessary. The tennis court can provide a model for Paris itself, which, digging and hacking through the ‘evils’ of her ‘undergrowth’ is ‘tending towards an order system of straight lines and right angles … necessary to her vitality, health and permanence’.79 I will argue in the remainder of this chapter that although this is the argument of ‘great power’ that Le Corbusier is trying to make, his doing so threatens to be undermined by some of the connotations of the sport of tennis, which, as will be shown, is something of a privileged activity in modernist architectural thought. Tennis could be seen as fashionable, frivolous and moderne in an art deco sense, all traits that Le Corbusier set himself against. However, I will make the claim that Le Corbusier and his circle continued to use the sport as a demonstration of the type of modernism that they advocated (and that this became easier to do once a new model for the female tennis player emerged) and that it plays an important role in their attempt to reimagine the modern commodity. A demonstration of the status and social cachet of tennis in the context of modern architecture is provided by the modernist Van Nelle factory in Rotterdam, 1925–31, designed by the partnership of Brinkman and van der Vlugt, working with Mart Stam. In a report written for the board as far back as 1914, Kees van der Leeuw, the owner of the company, which sold pre-packed tea, coffee and tobacco, envisaged the new factory having ‘sports grounds’ as part of the ‘modern provision’ that would improve van Nelle’s ‘ “standing” as manufacturers’.80 As 65

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built, these sports grounds consisted of soccer pitches for the workers ‘and tennis courts for the executives’.81 The assumption that tennis was not a game for workers persisted. In The City of Tomorrow, Le Corbusier advocates widening participation in sport through modernist city planning. The replacement of the individual house by ‘Garden City’ blocks of three double-height storeys allows for ‘Sport at the very door of one’s house … so that everyone – men, women and children – on reaching home, can change their things and come down for play and exercise, to fill their lungs and relax and strengthen their muscles’.82 He goes on to list the sports he has in mind: ‘Football, tennis, running tracks, basket ball, [sic] etc., are all available. You come home, you change, you can take your exercise just outside your home.’83 Yet, again and again, it is tennis that comes to stand in for sporting activity more generally in architecture during the 1920s and 1930s. Gerrit Rietveld includes a court in the model for the Private Villa, Paris project that de Stijl members Cornelis van Eesteren and Theo van Doesburg collaborated on for the dealer Léonce Rosenberg.84 When Berthold Lubetkin built Highpoint along Corbusian lines in north London in 1936–38, there were three tennis courts and a swimming pool in the grounds, but no soccer pitch, running track or basketball court to be seen. Miramonte, 1936–37, was built by Maxwell Fry at the time that he was in partnership with Walter Gropius and was photographed from its tennis court for the architectural press. The artist Paul Nash, designing a poster in 1936 for London Underground, views suburbia as a tree-lined straight avenue with three modernist villas on one side (reminiscent of the Neubühl Colony, designed for the Swiss Werkbund by the collective ABC, 1930–32) and a tennis court on the other (figure 17). The tennis courts might be there as a rectilinear analogy for the buildings themselves, the white dress of the players echoing the white of the buildings; however, it is hard to escape the sport’s connotations of affluence and sophistication when placed alongside housing that was out of the financial range of the majority of the population. Tennis in the literature on modernist architecture But the inclusion of tennis courts in the grounds of modernist villas is simply one aspect of the relationship between the sport and architecture. As Mark Wigley points out, the architectural critic Adolf Behne, in his 1928 book Eine Stunde Architektur (An Hour of Architecture), includes a drawing of a male tennis player next to Hannes Meyer’s spartan Co-Op room of 1926. Above this pairing are an oil painting of a fashionable nineteenth-century woman, actually Franz Skarbina’s The Girl on The Boardwalk, 1883, and a cluttered Berlin apartment (figure 18).85 The visual argument here is simpler to understand than Le Corbusier’s use of tennis. Oil paint is contrasted to modern, commercial line drawing; the bare modern interior is contrasted with the cluttered nineteenth-century interior; femininity and passivity (the woman holds her fan to acknowledge the man greeting her from the beach below, constructing her as an object to be viewed) is contrasted with masculinity and activity as the player executes a backhand; 66

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17  Paul Nash, Come Out to Live. Poster for London Underground, 1936

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18  Adolf Behne, Illustration from Eine Stunde Architektur, 1928

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the fashionable dress, bustle, boots, hat and fan are contrasted with the white short-sleeved shirt, flannels and pumps of the tennis player, who demonstrates by his pose the freedom of movement that they permit. In 1925 the most famous tennis player in the world was French. Suzanne Lenglen, nicknamed ‘The Goddess’, was a phenomenon on and off the court. As a singles player, she won Wimbledon six times, the French national title six times, four world hard court championships and the women’s Olympic gold medal in 1920. She was also the first woman to play in modern tennis dress. In the late nineteenth century, women’s tennis wear consisted of ankle-length skirts with petticoats underneath, corsets, girdles, heeled boots and a hat. In the early years of the twentieth century there had been some relaxation of this dress code. Lenglen’s biographer notes that she ‘surprised only a few spectators’ by not wearing petticoats or a corset when she debuted at Wimbledon in 1919.86 The following year she made ‘a quantum leap’ in fashion, taking to the court dressed by the couturier Jean Patou in a sleeveless silk blouse, short pleated skirt, knee-length silk stockings, wearing make-up and with a gold bracelet above her left elbow. In place of a hat she wore a silk bandeau.87 Based on the French Riviera, her on-court dress and demeanour established her celebrity status as much as her astonishing play and sequence of wins. As well as modelling for Patou, she was the centre of press attention throughout Europe and was visited by, amongst others, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Rudolph Valentino and the boxer Georges Carpentier. Her impact in terms of culture is registered primarily through Jean Cocteau’s ballet The Blue Train for the Ballets Russes in 1924. One of the central characters is a female tennis player based on Lenglen. She was danced by Bronislava Najinska, who studied newsreels of Lenglen to develop her choreography, and dressed by Coco Chanel, who modelled her designs on those of Patou. The set was designed by Henri Laurens and the curtain by Pablo Picasso.88 Peter Wollen describes the ballet as ‘the definitive celebration of “life-style modernism” ’, linking that term to tennis dress, which he describes as ‘crucial’, while also noting that Patou’s brother-in-law played tennis for France.89 Lenglen can be viewed as exemplifying a certain type of modernism: clothed in high fashion, an inspiration to Jean Cocteau, throwing over old modes of dress and behaviour. Mike O’Mahony has described her public persona as ‘the very epitome of the “flapper” ’, detailing the use of her image both as ‘a signifier of the post-war modern woman’ and ‘as pleasure-seeker and object of the male gaze far more than serious sporting competitor’.90 If this is the case, then Lenglen’s celebrity and the connotations of her image are also the antithesis of the rhetoric of Le Corbusier’s photograph. Instead of the highly visible flapper, we have two anonymous male players. The photograph is out of focus and badly exposed, which serves to emphasise the lines of the court over the identity of the players and the suggestion of a watching crowd behind the furthest competitor. In Toward an Architecture, Le Corbusier had written that: ‘One can pass judgment on a truly elegant man more conclusively than on a truly elegant woman, because male dress is standardized.’91 Certainly this seems to have been the case in tennis, 69

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where male players had adopted the white flannels of nineteenth-century cricketers (the Marylebone Cricket Club – guardians of the laws of that sport – having also played a part in standardising the rules of tennis) and maintained them virtually unaltered. From Le Corbusier’s point of view, with its anxieties in the face of feminine fashionability, Lenglen’s image was all too easily assimilated to the art deco moderne style that was one of his prominent targets in The Decorative Art of Today. ‘Exhibition sport has nothing to do with real sport; ‘it is more allied to the theatre, the circus, etc.’, he wrote in The City of Tomorrow.92 In response to Lenglen’s flamboyance, celebrity and femininity, Le Corbusier offers standardisation, anonymity and masculinity. Yet, by 1929 Sigfried Giedion, a close associate of Le Corbusier and the Secretary General of the newly formed Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), not only included a picture of a female tennis player in his book Befreites Wohnen (Liberated Living), but did so in such a way that Wigley can suggest that the woman’s white tennis outfit is ‘the paradigm of modern architecture’ (figure 19).93 Giedion’s tennis player is accompanied by a caption, placed vertically at right angles to the net, which reads ‘The new practical tennis costume, whose general introduction in America is striven for’. The player rests one hand on the net while her racquet is tucked under her other arm. Her dress is simple, not only in comparison to turn-of-the-century women’s tennis costume, but also by contrast to Lenglen’s bandeau and arm bracelet. Here the player has short blonde hair and wears a singlet, a pair of white shorts, white shoes and ankle socks. A plain square watch with a leather strap is on her wrist. She smiles, as Wigley says, ‘coyly at the reader’, and he uses the image to provoke a series of questions, asking why the outfit is worn by a model and taken from a fashion magazine before positing that modern architecture’s own adherence to white, accompanied by claims that it is exempt from fashion, might only cover up ‘the obvious thought that it is just a look. But not just any look: It is the look of resistance to fashion, the antifashion look.’94 In turning to Giedion’s illustration I want to account for how a female tennis player can come to be viewed as a paradigm of modern architecture when I have argued that such a position was not amenable to Le Corbusier in 1925. I believe that Giedion’s view of the modern woman tennis player was heavily conditioned by the emergence of another great player, Helen Wills. But more than this, I want to insist, in keeping with the general tenor of Wigley’s argument, that Le Corbusier and his circle were never as divorced from the fashionable, haute bourgeois connotations of tennis and its commodification as might at first appear. Giedion’s picture identifies America as the source of this new, practical tennis dress. Wills, known as ‘The American Girl’, dominated women’s tennis in the second half of the 1920s as surely as Lenglen had during the first. Her singles victories comprise eight Wimbledon titles, seven US titles, four French titles and the 1924 Olympic title, a competition from which Lenglen had withdrawn. The pair in fact played each other only once, amid great publicity at Cannes in 1926, a match that Lenglen won in two sets shortly before turning professional. Like 70

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19  Illustration from Sigfried Giedion, Befreites Wohnen, 1929

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Lenglen, Wills achieved celebrity on the strength of her sporting achievements, but unlike Lenglen, she did little to give the impression that she enjoyed the attention of the press. Like Lenglen, she became famous for her clothing, although this lacked the flamboyant touches of Lenglen’s court attire. Wills played in a pleated knee-length skirt, a sleeveless blouse and an eye visor. She was not heavily made up. As an adjective, Giedion’s ‘practical’ fits perfectly with Wills and her image. She was explicitly contrasted by the American press with the figure of the flapper, and celebrated for her ‘Modesty; Dignity; Simplicity; Athletic wholesomeness’.95 Another account stressed that a ‘new type is on the horizon and the new type is the sort that Helen Wills personifies’, while a third claimed that ‘it’s the girls of the Helen Wills type that young Miss America is taking today as her pattern’.96 Like Lenglen, she also attracted artists: Alexander Calder made a delicate wire sculpture of her hitting a forehand in 1927, while Diego Rivera took her as the model for his mural Allegory of California at the San Francisco Stock Exchange Club in 1931, commenting that Wills was his ‘ideal of the perfect type’.97 The poses the two women adopt in a photograph taken at their one contest (figure 20) uncannily echo those of a picture promoted by the Young Women’s Christian Association as illustrating proper and improper ways of dress (figure 21). It would no doubt be simplistic to read Wills’s image too closely onto the woman in Giedion’s photograph. The model wears make-up and her hair is tousled in a short style rather than being braided as Wills wore it. But the emergence of Wills as a player thought to embody the virtues of healthy living and outdoor life clearly brought women’s tennis into much closer alignment with the rhetoric of modern architecture. The photograph of the new woman tennis player supplants Behne’s line drawing of the male tennis player as a new ideal. Wills is obviously the inspiration for another comparison, the 1934 photograph that James Laver contrasts with tennis dress of 1886 (figure 22) in a manner that shows his debt to his continental forebears. The model in the photograph, supplied by Lillywhites sports shop in London, wears Wills’s trademark visor, as well as simple white clothing, including the short ankle socks favoured by Wills. In the accompanying essay, Laver argues that ‘Sport may well save us from the worst extravagance of fashion – sport and the new interest in machinery’.98 Yet, as Wigley points out, such photographs are commercial, turning both model and product into a commodity, a feature in a fashion magazine, something on display. In 1925 Patou, capitalising on his success in dressing Lenglen, opened a boutique called Le Coin des Sports, with rooms devoted to individual sports. Such an environment was not as foreign to the purist artists as might be supposed. Le Corbusier met Ozenfant when the latter was running the office of Jove, the couture house of Germaine Bongard, Paul Poiret’s sister, and the pair held their first joint exhibition at Galerie Thomas, also operated by Bongard, at the end of 1918. This was not a simple coincidence; Ozenfant edited his magazine L’Elan from Bongard’s offices and wrote there that it would be ‘a true injustice not to include fashion – dresses, hats, etc. – among the plastic arts’.99 Jove advertised in L’Esprit Nouveau, employing a drawing by Marie Laurencin, and the trio travelled to Rome together in 1921. Her poetry 72

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20  Suzanne Lenglen v. Helen Wills, Cannes, 1926

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21  Y.W.C.A. photograph, ‘Proper and Improper Way to Dress’, reproduced in Literary Digest, 14 May 1922

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22  Illustration from James Laver, ‘Clothing – And Design’, in Design in Modern Life, ed. John Gloag, 1934

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was published in the same issue as Le Corbusier’s famous ‘Architecture, The Lesson of Rome’, along with a prefatory essay by Vauvrecy, a pseudonym used by Le Corbusier and Ozenfant.100 In 1924, Ozenfant opened his own boutique, Dresses by Amédée, by which point Le Corbusier had become critical of what he perceived as dilettantism.101 Questions of the display of products were also a key concern of the group around Le Corbusier. In his Foundations of Modern Art, Ozenfant devotes a section to window dressing, illustrated by a remarkable photograph of geometrically arranged tennis racquets, wooden racquet frames, balls and a net (figure 23). Centrally positioned are two male V-neck sweaters. Although clearly French (revealed by the signs reading ‘Balles de Tennis’ and ‘Exceptionnellement’) the prominent brand names are English – Flying, Revenger, Primrose’s Lawn Tennis Balls – demonstrating the persistence of the sport’s English roots. Ozenfant praises the ‘sane geometry’ of modern window dressing, which he ascribes to ‘Purism and Léger’ in which ‘dresses, boots, casseroles, all play their eager parts in the equations to which they provide a solution’.102 But Ozenfant immediately goes on to identify modern window dressing as ‘an important factor in that town-planning to which Le Corbusier brought so much clear vision and power’.103 That Ozenfant couples the names of Fernand Léger and Le Corbusier is significant, because Léger’s interest in window display has been read by Tag

23  Illustration to Amédée Ozenfant, Foundations of Modern Art, 1931 76

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Gronberg as celebrating ‘the concept of urban spectacle’ in distinction to Le Corbusier’s advocacy of the ‘unobtrusive components of modern life’.104 Writing on window display, Léger portrays an environment where ‘frantic competition reigns’, where ‘to be looked at more than the neighbouring store is the violent desire that animates our streets’, before giving an account of how he and Maurice Raynal had observed the fastidious attention to detail demonstrated by a haberdasher arranging a window, calling him a ‘worthy craftsman, forging his own work with difficulty and conscientiousness’ and contrasting his attitude to the ‘carelessness and lack of discipline in the work of certain artists’.105 Léger pushes his argument even further, asserting, ‘I repeat, there is no hierarchy of art,’106 but retreats towards the conclusion the of essay by allowing for ‘some men … very few’ above the artisan who are able to fuse the work of the artisan and nature, balancing ‘the conscious and the unconscious, the objective and the subjective’.107 Léger’s essay is usually recalled today for its attack on hierarchy, rather than this ultimate recuperation of a new artistic figure standing above the artisan for whom he nevertheless has so much admiration. But it is this final insistence on the separation of art from everyday life that aligns him with Le Corbusier’s insistence on hierarchy: This is where we exercise our judgement: first of all the Sistine Chapel, afterwards chairs and filing cabinets; without doubt this is a question of the secondary level, just as the cut of man’s jacket is of secondary importance in his life. Hierarchy. First of all the Sistine Chapel, that is to say works truly etched with passion. Afterwards machines for sitting in, for filing, for lighting, type-machines, the problem of purification, of simplification, of precision, before the problem of poetry.108

A second-order question, the tennis match was not necessarily a motif for purist painting any more than the motor car had been. Le Corbusier and Ozenfant’s paintings hardly strayed from tabletop still-lifes, although Willi Baumeister, the German artist most closely associated with purism, produced a number of works devoted to tennis, including Tennis, 1927, which also incorporates a photograph of a men’s singles match. In its occasional column on sport, L’Esprit Nouveau praised the ‘beautiful design’ of the new indoor courts at the Sporting Club in Paris: ‘It is an immense cage of wood where the balls bounce. The roofs are transparent, the floors are painted green. There is no superfluous ornament. The simplicity of style has immediately attained excellence.’109 It was a sport which could be turned to purist ends; Le Corbusier’s photograph is definitely not modern art, but it is emphatically modern. There is a final example of tennis connoting a modern lifestyle not reliant on flamboyant decoration. In The Decorative Art of Today, Le Corbusier reproduces two advertisements for the Parisian luxury goods company Hermès. The second of these (figure 24) features a tennis racquet cover alongside a barrel bag (a masculine bag closely associated with sport). Near to this photograph, Le Corbusier, having attacked ‘the impasse of decoration and the fragility of the attempt to make our tools expressive of sentiment and of individual states of mind’, writes: 77

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24  Hermès advertisement included Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, 1925

Day after day, on the other hand, we notice among the products of industry articles of perfect convenience and utility, that soothe our spirits with the luxury afforded by the elegance of their conception, the purity of their execution and the efficiency of their operation. They are so well thought out that we feel them to be harmonious, and this harmony is sufficient for our gratification.110

For purism and its architectural associates, tennis was something that appeared distinctly modern, clean, healthy, geometric and elitist. The Hermès racquet cover as reproduced by Le Corbusier, the new American tennis dress as reproduced by Giedion, the window display of racquets and balls as reproduced by Ozenfant; the accoutrements of tennis are commodities that are aligned with modern architecture, just as the tennis court itself was often literally aligned to the modernist villa. Having been displayed for the first time to a potential consumer, they are displayed for a second time in the literature of modern architecture as exemplars of the new spirit, praised for their ‘perfect convenience and utility’, their practicality, and their ‘sane geometry’. Some of the connotations of tennis overlapped with the type of modernism propounded by figures such as Cocteau, which approached a deco style that Le Corbusier condemned, not for its emphasis on luxury, but for its attempt to reintroduce decoration. ‘Previously’, he writes, 78

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decorative objects were rare and costly. Today they are commonplace and cheap. Previously, plain objects were commonplace and cheap; today they are rare and expensive … decoration is disguise. It pays the manufacturer to employ a decorator to disguise the faults in his products, to conceal the poor quality of their materials and to distract the eye from their blemishes by offering it the spiced morsels of glowing gold-plate and strident symphonies … the luxury object is well made, neat and clean, pure and healthy, and its bareness reveals the quality of its manufacture.111

Lenglen’s extravagant dresses, headscarves and gold arm bracelets signalled a deco femininity, the construction of a flapper image in which ‘sane geometry’ mattered little. Sport was an integral part of Le Corbusier and Ozenfant’s new spirit, signalled as such by the appearance of the term on the masthead of the journal that the pair edited. But the connotations of tennis were not stable; it was, rather, a contested site where the purists sought to impose their version of modernism in opposition to those of others. Notes 1 Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, trans. James Dunnett (London: Architectural Press, 1987), 170. 2 Fernande Olivier, Picasso and His Friends, trans. Jane Miller (London: Heinemann, 1964), 104. 3 Olivier, Picasso, 128. 4 Pepe Karmel reproduces the photograph as fig. 277 of his Picasso and the Invention of Cubism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 188, where he also discusses Olivier’s comments on Picasso. Salmon’s account of Braque at the punch bag, written under his pseudonym La Palette, was published as ‘Georges Braque’, Paris-Journal, 13 October 1911, trans. Jane Marie Todd in A Cubism Reader: Documents and Criticism, 1906–1914, eds Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 168. 5 Olivier, Picasso, 104. 6 William Wees has identified Young Ahearn, Colin Bell, Dick Burge, Petty Officer Curran, Bandsman Rice and Bombardier Wells as boxers. See Wees, Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1972), Appendix B, ‘The Blasted and the Blessed’, 217–27. 7 Tamar Garb, Bodies of Modernity: Figure and Flesh in Fin-de-Siècle France (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988), 30. 8 ‘Ist der Boxsport Roh?’, Querschnitt 1 (1921), quoted in translation by David Bathrick, ‘Max Schmeling on the Canvas: Boxing as an Icon of Weimar Culture’, New German Critique 51 (Autumn 1990), 119. 9 Bathrick, ‘Max Schmeling’, 116. See also Erik N. Jensen, Body by Weimar: Athletes, Gender, and German Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), chapter 2. 10 Robert Alden Sanborn, ‘Fight Nights at the Armory A.A.’, The Soil 1, no. 3 (March 1917), 134. 11 Georges Carpentier, Ma Vie de Boxeur, quoted in translation in Karmel, Picasso, 221, n. 248. 79

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12 R. C. [Robert J. Coady], ‘Ted Lewis’, The Soil 1, no. 2 (January 1917), 71. 13 See my ‘ “BLAST SPORT”? Vorticism, Sport and William Roberts’s Boxers’, Modernism/ Modernity 24, no. 2 (April 2017), 349–70. 14 On Grosz and boxing generally, see Christopher Wilk, ‘The Healthy Body Culture’, Modernism: Designing a New World, 1914–1939 (London: V&A Publications, 2006), 264. 15 Pierre Daix and Joan Rosselet, Picasso: The Cubist Years, 1907–1916 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979), no. 469, 279: ‘The traditional title, Boxer, or Negro Boxer, probably derives from the word onces [ounces] on the left … This is, in fact, the head of a man with a pipe.’ 16 Willard Bohn, ‘Chasing Butterflies with Arthur Cravan’, in New York Dada, ed. Rudolf E. Kuenzli (New York: Willis Locker and Owens, 1986), 120. 17 Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, ‘Arthur Cravan and American Dada’, 4 Dada Suicides: Selected Texts of Arthur Cravan, Jacques Rigaut, Julien Torma and Jacques Vaché, eds Roger Conover, Terry Hale and Paul Lenti (London: Atlas, 2005), 74. 18 Buffet-Picabia, ‘Arthur Cravan and American Dada’, 74. 19 ‘Arthur Cravan, s’il n’avait pas été dans une période de paresse eut envoyé une toile avec ce titre: Le Champion du Monde au Bordel’, Arthur Cravan, L’Exposition des Indépendants’, Maintenant, no. 4 (March–April 1914), 9. 20 Maintenant, no. 2 (July 1913), 22. 21 Roger Conover, ‘Arthur Cravan’, 4 Dada Suicides: Selected Texts of Arthur Cravan, Jacques Rigaut, Julien Torma and Jacques Vaché, eds Roger Conover, Terry Hale and Paul Lenti (London: Atlas, 2005), 25. 22 Steven A. Riess, Sport in Industrial America, 1850–1920 (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1995). 23 Riess, Sport in Industrial America, 112. 24 Translated as My Life and Battles, ed. and trans. Christopher Rivers (Washington, DC: Potomac, 2009). 25 ‘Jack Johnson Comes Back’, The Daily Record and Mail, Monday 29 June 1914, 7: ‘Among the ladies were such great names as Baroness Henri de Rothschild (yr.), Duchess d’Uzes, Comtesse Machieu de Noailles, the poet; the Princess de Lucinge, Duchess de Rohan, Princess Morouzieff, and Comtesse de Proumiers.’ 26 Roger Conover, ‘Mina Loy’s “Colossus”: Arthur Cravan Undressed’, in New York Dada, ed. Rudolf E. Kuenzli (New York: Willis Locker and Owens, 1986), 103. Full details of the competitions are given in Roger Conover, ‘Arthur Cravan: Stances of the Century’, in Boxer: An Anthology of Writings on Boxing and Visual Culture, ed. David Chandler et al. (London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1996), 101. 27 Conover, ‘Arthur Cravan’, 4 Dada Suicides, 23. 28 Conover, ‘Arthur Cravan’, 4 Dada Suicides, 23–4. 29 Buffet-Picabia, ‘Arthur Cravan and American Dada’, 73. 30 Fabian Lloyd [pseud. Arthur Cravan], ‘To Be or Not to Be … American’, L’Echo des Sports, 10 June 1909, trans. Terry Hale in 4 Dada Suicides, 31–2. Cravan used his real name on the by-line of the original piece. 31 Conover, ‘Arthur Cravan’, 4 Dada Suicides, 25. 32 ‘Arthur Cravan vs. Jack Johnson’, The Soil 1, no. 4 (April 1917), 162. This account of an interview with Cravan is unsigned but probably the work of Enrique Cross, The Soil’s Literary Editor. 33 Kasia Boddy, Boxing: A Cultural History (London: Reaktion, 2008), 231. 80

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34 Jack Johnson, In the Ring and Out (London: Proteus, 1977), 85. 35 Burns Mantle, ‘This is the Life in Paris by Night’, Chicago Daily Tribune, 19 July 1914, A2. 36 Conover, ‘Arthur Cravan’, 4 Dada Suicides, 21. 37 Johnson, In the Ring and Out, 86. 38 Conover, ‘Arthur Cravan: Stances of the Century’, 99. 39 ‘Arthur Cravan vs. Jack Johnson’, 161. 40 Johnson, In the Ring and Out, 86. Johnson also calls Cravan ‘Craven’ and writes that he was an ‘English heavyweight’. 41 Blaise Cendrars, Sky: Memoirs, trans. Nina Rootes (New York: Paragon, 1992), 198–202. The passage is written with evident contempt for Cravan: Cendrars claimed he ‘learned the details from an eye-witness of this epoch-making encounter’ (202), but ‘I do not know which disused arena they used’ (201). He also claims that Cravan left for America immediately after the fight, but Cravan remained in Spain until December 1916. He refers to extensive contact between Cravan and Johnson during their time in Paris, which seems at odds with Johnson’s misspelling of Cravan’s name in his autobiography and Cravan’s recollection of one meeting in Paris, discussed below. Further evidence of Cendrars’s unreliability as a witness comes immediately after his treatment of Cravan, when he claims that Marcel Duchamp signed the infamous Fountain using his Rrose Sélavy alias, when of course it was signed ‘R. Mutt’ (203). 42 Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, trans. David Britt (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), 86 43 Buffet-Picabia, ‘Arthur Cravan and American Dada’, 75. 44 Graeme Kent, Boxing’s Strangest Fights, new ed. (London: Robson, 2000), 98. 45 Conover uses ‘pathetic six rounds’, in ‘Mina Loy’s “Colossus” ’, 103. The decisive newspaper accounts are referenced in ‘Arthur Cravan: Stances of the Century’, 107, with the titles consulted being El Mundo Deportivo, La Veu, Illustraćio Catalano, and Diari de Barcelona, 111, n. 12. 46 R. Larruy, ‘La Exhibicion de Jack Johnson’, El Mundo Deportivo, 24 April 1916, 1. I am extremely grateful to Dennis Duncan for drawing my attention to the online existence of this report at http://hemeroteca.mundodeportivo.com/preview/1916/04/24/ pagina-1/609416/pdf.html# (consulted 4 May 2016). 47 Boddy, Boxing, 250. 48 Mina Loy, ‘Excerpts from “Colossus” ’, in Conover, ‘Mina Loy’s “Colossus” ’, 104. 49 R. J. Coady, ‘American Art’, The Soil 1, no. 1 (December 1916), 3–4. 50 R. J. Coady, ‘American Art’, The Soil 1, no. 2 (January 1917), 55. 51 Jay Bochner, ‘The Marriage of Rogue and The Soil’, Little Magazines and Modernism: New Approaches, eds Suzanne W. Churchill and Adam McKible (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 61, 63–4. 52 ‘Great Excitement in Latin Quarter’, New York Times, 22 March 1914, C3. 53 Loy, ‘Excerpts from “Colossus” ’, 104. 54 Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995), 226. 55 Tristan Tzara, ‘Zurich Chronicle, 1915–1919’, in The Dada Almanac, ed. Richard Huelsenbeck, Malcolm Green and Alastair Brotchie, trans. Malcolm Green et al., second ed. (London: Atlas, 1998), 21. 56 Arthur Cravan, ‘Différentes Choses’, Maintenant, no. 1 (April 1912), 7. 81

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57 ‘Arthur Cravan vs. Jack Johnson’, 162. 58 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, eds Eric Dunning, John Goudsblom and Stephen Mennell, trans. Edmund Jephcott, rev. ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 170–1. 59 See the notes to the fight at Boxrec.com: http://boxrec.com/media/index.php/ Jack_Johnson_vs._James_J._Jeffries (accessed 28 May 2016). 60 Geoffrey C. Ward, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (London: Pimlico, 2006), 353. 61 Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, 353. 62 ‘Qu’on le sache une fois pour toutes: Je ne veux pas me civiliser’, Maintenant, 4 (March–April 1914), 18. 63 Arthur Cravan, ‘Notes’, 4 Dada Suicides, 63. ‘Foutez-vous vous-même un coup de poing dans la figure et tombez morts’ are the last words of Tzara’s ‘Monsieur Aa the Antiphilosopher Sends us this Manifesto’, published 391, 13 (July 1920), 3. 64 Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow and its Planning, trans. Frederick Etchells (New York: Dover, 1987), 24. 65 Quoted in translation by Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 119. The claim is made in Vient de paraître, a publicity brochure for Vers une architecture, held at the Fondation Le Corbusier. 66 Roland Barthes, ‘The Photographic Message’, in his Image, Music, Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), 15–31. 67 For one instance of the elitism of the journal, see La Direction, ‘Ce que nous avons fait, ce que nous ferons’, L’Esprit Nouveau, nos. 11–12 (1921), 1214: ‘NOTRE DÉSIR EST DONC DE PROVOQUER PAR LA REVUE, LA CONNEXION INDISPENSABLE DES ÉLITES’ (OUR DESIRE IS THEREFORE TO BRING ABOUT THROUGH THIS MAGAZINE, THE ESSENTIAL CONNECTION OF ELITES). 68 Richard Holt, Sport and Society in Modern France (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1981), 177. 69 Holt, Sport and Society in Modern France, 178. 70 Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (London: Yale University Press, 1998), 16. 71 Heiner Gillmeister, Tennis: A Cultural History (London: Leicester University Press, 1997), 194. 72 Herbert Chipp, Lawn Tennis Recollections (London, 1898), quoted in Gillmeister, Tennis, 205. 73 Barry Smart, The Sport Star: Modern Sport and the Cultural Economy of Celebrity (London: Sage, 2005), 205. 74 Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow, 13. 75 Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow, 21. 76 Amédée Ozenfant and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret [pseud. Le Corbusier], La Peinture Moderne (Paris: G. Crès, n.d. [1925]), 155–6: ‘l’angle droit est un des symboles de la perfection.’ Both ‘L’Ordre’ and ‘L’angle droit’ originally appeared as essays in the same issue of L’Esprit Nouveau, no. 18 (1923). 77 In the original French edition all three photographs appear on the same page opening. See Le Corbusier, Urbanisme (Paris: G. Crès, n.d. [1925]), 22–3. 78 Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow, 23. 79 Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow, 25. 82

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80 Report by C. H. [Kees] van der Leeuw, December 1914, Van Nelle archives, quoted in translation in Paul Overy, Light, Air and Openness: Modern Architecture Between the Wars (London: Thames and Hudson, 2007), 206. 81 Overy, Light, Air and Openness, 205. This area was covered over to form a car park and distribution centre in the 1970s. 82 Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow, 202. 83 Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow, 205. 84 See Nancy Troy, The De Stijl Environment (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 102, fig. 51. 85 Adolf Behne, Eine Stunde Architektur (Stuttgart: Fritz Wedekind, 1928), 38. See Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 323–5. 86 Larry Engelman, The Goddess and the American Girl: The Story of Suzanne Lenglen and Helen Wills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 24. 87 Engelman, The Goddess and the American Girl, 24. 88 See Peter Wollen, ‘Art and Fashion: Friends or Enemies?’, in his Paris Manhattan: Writings on Art (London: Verso, 2004), 169, Mike O’Mahony, Olympic Visions: Images of the Games Through History (London: Reaktion, 2012), 52, and Mary E. Davis, Classic Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 197–201 for short accounts of the ballet and the link to Lenglen. Davis also uses the term ‘lifestyle modernism’ in connection with the work and cites Lynn Garafola as the first to employ it in her Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Lenglen is also mentioned briefly by Hannes Meyer in his essay, ‘The New World’ (discussed in chapter five) and is included in a design drawing for a production of Claude Debussy’s Jeux by the Kroll Opera in Berlin, set on a tennis court and performed at the Red–White Tennis Club in 1931, with choreography by Rudolf von Laban. Although Christopher Wilk believes that her image was used only as ‘a pictorial device’, both Debussy’s piece, originally composed in 1913, also for the Ballets Russes, and its staging at a tennis club testify to the crossover between the sport and modernism at this time. See Christopher Wilk, ‘Teo Otto, Jeux: Poème Dansè – Tennisplatz’, cat. 199 in Modernism: Designing a New World 1914–1939, ed. Wilk (London: V&A Publications, 2006), 292 and Plate 7.19. 89 Wollen, ‘Art and Fashion’, 169. 90 O’Mahony, Olympic Visions, 50–1. 91 Le Corbusier, Toward An Architecture, trans. John Goodman (London: Frances Lincoln, 2008), 189. 92 Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow, 202. 93 Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses, 120. The image is also discussed by Adrian Forty in his ‘Of Cars, Clothes and Carpets: Design Metaphors in Architectural Thought’, Journal of Design History 2, no. 1 (1989), 12. 94 Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses, 121–2. 95 Unidentified newspaper report cited in Engelman, The Goddess and the American Girl, 97. 96 Unidentified newspaper reports cited in Engelman, The Goddess and the American Girl, 97. 97 Rivera quoted in Engelman, The Goddess and the American Girl, 303. 98 James Laver, ‘Clothes – and Design’, in Design in Modern Life, ed. John Gloag (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1934), 56. 83

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99 Atrabile [pseud. Amédée Ozenfant], ‘Expositions’, L’Elan, 1 January 1916, quoted in translation in Davis, Classic Chic, 101. 100 Vauvrecy [pseud. Amédée Ozenfant and Le Corbusier], ‘Un poète: Germaine Bongard’, L’Esprit Nouveau 14 (1922), 1627–32. 101 See Françoise Ducros, ‘Amédée Ozenfant: “Purist Brother” ’, L’Esprit Nouveau: Purism in Paris, 1918–1925, ed. Carol S. Eliel (Los Angeles and New York: Los Angeles County Museum of Art/Harry N. Abrams, 2001), 95. 102 Amédée Ozenfant, Foundations of Modern Art, trans. John Rodker (New York: Dover, 1952), 162. 103 Ozenfant, Foundations of Modern Art, 162. 104 Tag Gronberg, ‘Making up the Modern City: Modernity on Display at the 1925 International Exposition’, L’Esprit Nouveau: Purism in Paris, 1918–1925, ed. Carol S. Eliel (Los Angeles and New York: Los Angeles County Museum of Art/Harry N. Abrams, 2001), 118. 105 Fernand Léger, ‘The Machine Aesthetic: The Manufactured Object, the Artisan, and the Artist’, in Léger, Functions of Painting, ed. Edward F. Fry, trans. Alexandra Anderson (New York: Viking Press, 1973), 56 (italics in the original). The essay originally appeared in the Bulletin de l’Effort Moderne during 1924. 106 Léger, ‘The Machine Aesthetic’, 57 (italics in the original). 107 Léger, ‘The Machine Aesthetic’, 60. 108 Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, 76. 109 ‘Sports’, L’Esprit Nouveau 15 (1922), 1754: ‘Beau décor aussi celui des courts couverts du “Sporting Club”, Coupe de Noël, vainqueur Brugnon. C’est une immense cage de bois où bondissent les balles. Les toits sont transparents, les planchers sont peints en vert. Il n’y a là aucun ornement superflu, la simplicité du style a atteint d’emblée l’excellence.’ The unsigned piece is almost certainly by Le Corbusier or Ozenfant. 110 Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, 91. 111 Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, 87.

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3 Oval balls and cubist players: French paintings of rugby

In my analysis of paintings of racing cyclists, I concentrated on three works that were produced over a relatively short period of time, but in different countries. In this chapter, my analysis is concerned with paintings of rugby (and to a lesser extent, soccer) by French artists produced at three moments over a much longer period. The study begins with a reading of The Football Players by Henri Rousseau, a work that, although painted in 1908, recalls the introduction of rugby into France in the final decade of the nineteenth century. Major pieces by Robert Delaunay and Albert Gleizes exhibited during 1913 act as a pivot in my analysis, and recall some of the issues raised in the discussion of the paintings of cyclists. Finally, I will discuss a series of works by the cubist André Lhote painted during and after the First World War that take rugby or soccer as their subject. Doing this enables not simply a close analysis of the works themselves, but also a reading of the way in which attitudes to rugby and soccer changed as the game spread both in terms of geography and class, as well as an examination of the role that they play in aesthetic debates. Before embarking on that project, a word on terminology. In France up until the Great War, ‘football’ meant rugby. Hence Rousseau’s The Football Players is a picture of rugby, as is Gleizes’s The Football Players. ‘Football’ as understood in Britain runs counter to this and denotes the game known in the United States (and sometimes Britain) as soccer, a game which was usually qualified as ‘football association’ in France at the time (which corresponds to its full British title of Association Football, named for its governing body). Accordingly, here as elsewhere in the book, I will write of ‘rugby’ and ‘soccer’ but obviously have not changed any of the contemporary descriptions. Nor have I thought it desirable to alter the titles of works to reflect a twentyfirst-century understanding, especially as in the case of some works by Lhote it is unclear whether it is soccer or rugby that is being played. Both rugby and soccer were imported into France from England. The two codes there had common origins and became separated only once the clubs that advocated a game based on handling seceded from the Football Association in 85

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1871 to form the Rugby Football Union, leaving the remaining clubs to develop a kicking game and establish the world’s first national soccer competition, the FA Cup, in 1872. The teams competing in that final were Wanderers, a side with its origins in former pupils of Harrow School, one of England’s most exclusive, and the military men of Royal Engineers. The old school teams quickly lost their dominance, however, as professional clubs began to find success in the Football League, which was established in 1888. Soccer became largely a working-class, urban, sport with its power bases in the industrial cities of the Midlands and the North of England, as well as Scotland, which not only had its own league but supplied a large number of the best players to the English teams. Rugby, on the other hand, remained resolutely amateur. Its players were largely drawn from the middle class or above, and the spread of the game was primarily through schools and universities. When the game did become popular outside these confines, in Yorkshire, Lancashire and South Wales, the Rugby Football Union moved to enforce strict amateurism in a way that its counterparts in the Football Association had not. This precipitated a further split, with the eventual establishment of the sport now known as Rugby League, a professional game played in the North of England where it rivalled soccer in popularity. This split had the net effect of entrenching Rugby Union (which I will simply call rugby hereafter, for simplicity’s sake) as a southern, middle-class, amateur sport with its power centre in London.1 All this would be irrelevant were it not for the fact that the various social statuses of these sports informed the decisions of a small group of well-to-do Anglophile Parisians, who were looking to establish English sports in France, in part as a reaction to the defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. Some prior forms of village or street football did exist in France, as they did elsewhere, going by the name of jeu-de-ballon, but these were distractions from the concerted attempt to introduce rugby to the France of the Belle Epoque. The effort to propagate rugby in the last decades of the nineteenth century seems to have motivated Henri Rousseau to paint his The Football Players (plate 4) in the first decade of the twentieth. Chief among those lobbying for the introduction of English sports was Baron Pierre de Coubertin, whose efforts to promote sport not simply as healthy but also as morally enriching would eventually culminate in the establishment of the Olympic games. But behind this project lay a second. In the words of Philip Dine, cultural historian of French rugby, de Coubertin was the ‘most prominent advocate of sport as a means of simultaneously defending the class interests of the upper echelons of French society and furthering the country’s imperial ambitions’.2 His role in establishing the Olympics will be examined in a later chapter, but before that Coubertin was instrumental in founding an organisation, the Union des Sociétés Françaises des Sports Athlétiques (USFSA), which had control of most French sports up until the end of the Great War, and in many ways rugby was its flagship sport. De Coubertin’s love for the game perhaps transcended even his natural class preferences. He was a particular admirer

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of Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby School celebrated in the book Tom Brown’s Schooldays. In the view of Olympic historian Allen Guttmann, ‘Arnold became for Coubertin a kind of spiritual father figure’.3 In 1883 Coubertin visited the school’s chapel for the first time, where Arnold was buried. Later, he described how on another visit he experienced a twilit vision in which, looking at Arnold’s tomb, ‘I dreamed I saw before me a cornerstone of the British Empire’.4 Famously, it was at Rugby in 1823 that pupil William Webb Ellis ‘with a fine disregard for the rules of football as played in his time, first took the ball in his arms and ran with it, thus originating the distinctive character of the Rugby game’, thereby making the school and the sport synonymous.5 Arnold was not at the school at that point but became headmaster only five years later, and it was under his stewardship that the game developed, although its first written rules came in 1845, five years after his death. Coubertin used his experiences touring England’s most exclusive schools to proselytise for the introduction of their emphasis on sport into French education. Leaving aside a few clubs founded by British expatriates, the first properly French clubs were the Parisian pair of Racing Club de France and Stade Français, founded in 1882 and 1883, respectively. It was no coincidence that, as we have seen in the previous chapter, these were the same two clubs that were at the heart of the introduction of tennis. The clubs were selective, with personal recommendation required in order to be become a member and high fees levied so as to remain one. Racing Club established their headquarters in the Bois de Boulogne, Stade on the Champ de Mars. The clubs played rugby in the winter and athletics in the summer. As Richard Holt points out: ‘Association football was not thought to be suitable for the well-to-do because of the distinctly popular character it was acquiring in Britain.’6 The USFSA was founded in 1890, with Coubertin as president and Racing Club’s Georges de Saint-Clair as secretary, as an organisation to which individual clubs could adhere, whether they were interested in playing rugby, the less preferable soccer, tennis, rowing, cycling, athletics or cross-country running. It saw off various rival national organisations before the First World War, and was so influential in the development of French rugby that the first French national teams took to the pitch wearing white shirts adorned not just with the famous cockerel badge, but also the interlocking blue and red circles of the USFSA. When Stade played Racing Club in the first French rugby championship final in 1892, the referee was one Pierre de Coubertin. Henri Rousseau: rugby’s history painter It seems probable that Rousseau had Racing Club specifically in mind when painting The Football Players. One team wears Racing Club’s blue-and-white hooped jerseys, and the initially perplexing wooded location surely represents the Bois de Boulogne, where the club had its headquarters. The opposition does not appear to be Stade Français, Racing Club’s great rivals as a domestic French team,

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since Stade did not wear red and yellow, but the number of potential opposing teams would have been small. Stade and Racing Club were in fact the only entrants for that inaugural French championship. The following year’s competition was contested between just five teams, amongst them a side from the art school Académie Julian. It is possible indeed that the scene depicts a friendly match or training between members of the same club. Some fraternal feeling between the opposing sides is evinced in the socks of the participants. One of Racing’s players wears red and yellow socks, which matches the kit of his opposition, while one of the red and yellow players wears blue socks that match the strip of his adversaries. A more marked solidarity is indicated by the similar physiques, moustaches and hairstyles of the four; these are men of the same class (Coubertin himself had dark hair and a waxed moustache). The ball is not a rugby ball as we now think of it, but neither is it a perfect sphere. The player about to catch it, in particular, embodies what one account describes as the emergence in France of ‘a non-violent and spectacular style of play … combining the aristocratic demand for elegance with the bourgeois emphasis on individual performance’.7 Three of the players, pictured with torso and head square to the picture plane and their limbs in various poses, appear as Vitruvian man reimagined for the Belle Epoque. The catcher’s teammate and twin mirrors the movements of his fellow and his eyes are trained on the catcher as if on a lead choreographer. But the opposition players are not negligible. Despite the blow landed on the catcher, these are men joining together to promote not simply a sport, but a vision of French masculinity. ‘Ludus pro patria’ – the game for the Fatherland – ran the USFSA’s motto. The blue skies, the arcadian woodland setting and, perhaps above all, the catching player’s calm and steady gaze, fixed not on the ball but on the viewer, are all testament to this. Rousseau was painting a backwards look at rugby’s history, of course, and 1908 was very different from 1892. Rather as with Lyonel Feininger’s The Velocipedists, discussed in the first chapter, The Football Players is an imagined history, in this case almost a mythic painting of the origins of French rugby. As with Feininger, Rousseau emphasises the aristocratic beginnings of a sport that had become both more widespread geographically and more diverse in class terms by the time of the painting. From the vantage point of 1908, the aspects of organised sport that most closely involved modernity were easier to recognise. This was even more the case in 1947 when Tristan Tzara came to write an appraisal of Rousseau’s work in the form of a preface to a play written by the Douanier. Tzara noted that Rousseau’s appreciation of modernity went beyond its most obvious aspects, such as the aeroplanes or dirigibles that appeared in his work, to encompass The Football Players, with a ‘synthesis of movement’ in which ‘the stripes of the jerseys transmit a poignant moment of great feeling’.8 The USFSA had certainly not lost its control of the administration of French rugby by 1908, but the hegemony of exclusive Parisian clubs had been broken. In Dine’s words, Racing Club and Paris ‘were less concerned with extending the game’s base (either socially or geographically) than with using it to reinforce 88

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an established system of class-based privilege’.9 However, they were unable to prevent the spread of rugby to other parts of the country. In Dine’s view, the ‘head start that rugby effectively had on football – and that was to last until the Great War – thus meant that it became the first of the modern team games to reach the French provinces, and in the case of the region to the south and west of the Loire it was able to establish an effective hegemony that would endure until the present day’.10 The most notable location outside Paris was Bordeaux. The city’s team, Stade Bordelais, was founded in 1889. Between 1899 and 1911 it won the national championship seven times, attracting crowds of nearly thirty thousand. Local lycéens and university students who had left Paris, as well as British expatriates involved in the wine trade, were important in establishing the sport. So too was Dr Philippe Tissié and his Ligue Girondine de l’Education Physique, an autonomous organisation that was founded in 1888. Initially conceived to promote French sports, the Ligue ended up promoting rugby and Stade Bordelais was formed as the first all-French club outside Paris. Its 1899 victory made it the first non-Parisian side to win the national championship and enshrined a geographical rivalry between the old Parisian clubs and the emergent teams of the south-west. Dine summarises the reaction of one local paper, La Petite Gironde: ‘Hailing the courage of the local players in what was presented as an epic combat, the paper went on to set out a list of regionalist grievances against Paris, including particularly the failure of selectors based in the capital to pick Bordeaux players for the national side.’11 As Bordeaux emerged as a rugby centre, so other towns in the south-west produced teams to rival them. By the Great War, teams from Toulouse, Bayonne and Perpignan (as well as Lyon) had won the French championship. Therefore, at the time that Rousseau painted his picture, rugby was no longer an enthusiasm confined to the metropolitan elite. Stade Bordelais had taken four championships in a row between 1904 and 1907. Crowds for the matches were steadily rising and France had begun to compete at an international level. Five thousand people saw France play England in 1908. Rousseau’s picture reveals a characteristic concern with modernity, but modernity is elided at the same time that it is presented. The origins of rugby in France were certainly modern, with the importation of an English game, the establishment of clubs and bureaucracies, and novel ways of dressing for sport. However, Rousseau chooses to omit any indication of both the rising popularity of the game (no one watches the players) and its expansion beyond its haute bourgeois and aristocratic origins. Rugby as spectacle: Robert Delaunay and Albert Gleizes These developments would be celebrated instead by Robert Delaunay, who painted two notable versions of a rugby lineout titled The Cardiff Team. The final result so impressed Guillaume Apollinaire that he termed the painting ‘the most modern picture’ at the Salon des Indépendants in March 1913 (plate 5).12 In contrast to Rousseau’s vision, Delaunay’s representation of the game is resolutely contemporary 89

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and urban, but the two painters had been close and Delaunay was one of Rousseau’s most prominent advocates. Delaunay’s mother had commissioned Rousseau’s famous The Snake Charmer, 1907. Following Rousseau’s death, Delaunay had been instrumental in organising a retrospective at the 1911 Salon des Indépendants.13 During the gestation of The Cardiff Team, Rousseau was evidently on Delaunay’s mind; there was an exhibition at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery to which Delaunay lent work in October 1912, and a letter of January 1913 to the German Expressionist Franz Marc is fulsome in its praise of the older artist, lauding his ‘frankness of vision’ and his creation of a world ‘more powerful, weightier, less bourgeois than Cézanne’s’.14 In the same letter, Delaunay told Marc that he was ‘still working on the Equipe de Cardiff, which gives me great pleasure’.15 Indeed, as Nancy Ireson notes, Tzara’s essay on Rousseau surprisingly ‘makes no mention of Delaunay’s Cardiff Team despite its similarity to Rousseau’s Football Players’.16 It is not fanciful to suggest that The Cardiff Team is heavily indebted to Rousseau’s work at the same time that it so thoroughly overhauls and updates it that, five years later, little trace of Rousseau’s sentiment remains. Delaunay seems to have based the composition of the players in all the versions on a photograph that appeared in the weekly sports paper, La Vie au Grand Air (figure 25). It shows a match between Stade Toulousain and Sporting Club Universitaire de France (SCUF), where the provincial team emerged 16–8 winners. Delaunay clipped a copy of this photograph and drew in the large Ferris wheel, as well as an advertising hoarding with his own name (a feature of the second and third versions of the painting). The photograph definitely does seem to have played a significant part in ordering the composition. Throughout the three versions, one team retains SCUF’s distinctive banded shirts and the attitudes of the players are recognisably those of the photograph, as is the placement of the Ferris wheel. In his detailed study of the sources for The Cardiff Team, Pascal Rousseau correctly identified the photograph as appearing in La Vie au Grand Air on 18 January 1913. Even allowing for the possibility that the magazine was available before its publication date, the photograph cannot have been taken before 12 January, as this was when the match was played.17 However, as noted above, Delaunay was ‘still working’ on the First Version of the painting (figure 26) when he wrote to Marc on 11 January, and it was shown at Delaunay’s exhibition at the Der Sturm gallery in Berlin, which opened on 17 January, so clearly both the conception and some of the execution of the First Version, as well as the title, predate the appearance of the photograph.18 The First Version was exhibited in Germany with the title L’Equipe de Cardiff. Esquisse. 1912–1913, which suggests that Delaunay had begun working on it before the end of the previous year; this seems likely, given the scale of the work. The reference to it being an esquisse, or sketch, is uncommon for a painting of this size, but almost certainly refers to the plans for the more detailed and even larger Third Version to be displayed at the Indépendants in March, where it too was dated 1912–13. One possible explanation for the apparently paradoxical situation that the First

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25  Clipping from La Vie au Grand Air, 18 January 1913, showing a rugby match between Stade Toulousain and SCUF, with hand-drawn additions by Robert Delaunay

Version was exhibited the day before the publication of the photograph that inspired it is that Delaunay reworked the First Version after its exhibition at Der Sturm as part of the preparations for the Third Version. The paintings are crammed with references to modernity.19 Next to the wheel, which was erected for the Universal Exhibition of 1900, Delaunay includes the Eiffel Tower in a stylised rendering familiar from his Windows series of 1912. To the left of these flies a Voisin bi-plane. Beneath this is a large sign proclaiming Astra, a French aviation company. To the left of this is another fragment of a word, ‘AL’, which Robert Wohl has suggested is the end of Le Journal, a paper which was supportive of aviation and whose title Pablo Picasso had incorporated in a variety of ways in his cubist works over the previous couple of years.20 To the right of the sign for Astra, there is another advertisement, this one a perimeter

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26  Robert Delaunay, The Cardiff Team, First Version, 1912–13

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advertising hoarding. In the First Version this reads ‘MAGIC/PARIS’, a reference to Magic City amusements, a venue also evoked by Sonia Delaunay in her Tango Magic City, 1913. In the second and third versions, this changes to ‘DELAUNAY/ [NE]W YORK–PARIS–M’. Rousseau suggests that this ‘M’ stands for Moscow, but it could just as plausibly be Munich, where Delaunay had shown with Wassily Kandinsky and Marc’s Blaue Reiter group at the end of 1911 and again at the gallery of Hans Goltz in October 1912.21 The cut-off, as well as being a signature modern device, perhaps encourages such speculation, positioning Delaunay as moving between a potentially endless chain of world cities. As in Henri Rousseau’s picture, there is no crowd, but here the advertising serves as an index of the presence of spectators. Delaunay’s rugby match is a commercial spectacle even if its players are amateur (and allegations that French rugby players were not amateur were often made, especially by British observers). Gate receipts for the fifteen thousand fans who watched Stade Toulousain’s victory in the 1912 Championship were a record twenty-five thousand francs. Stade Bordelais’s players’ images were used for the opening of the Nouvelles Galeries department store in Bordeaux in 1911 in a way that would have been unthinkable in Britain.22 Archival photographs of a match between Stade Français and the English club Rosslyn Park played in December 1912 at the Parc des Princes do indeed show perimeter advertising, and one advertisement there, for Dufayel cycles, also features in a study for The Cardiff Team held by the Pompidou Centre.23 The source imagery for Delaunay’s works is also relentlessly commercial and ephemeral: taken from media photographs, postcard views and advertisements. This was not lost on Apollinaire, who noticed that with The Cardiff Team, Delaunay’s painting ‘now has a definite popular character. I believe that this is one of the highest tributes one can bestow on a painter today’.24 There remains the intriguing question of why Delaunay chose to retain the title The Cardiff Team when the photograph from La Vie au Grand Air showed a match between Stade Toulousain and SCUF. Robert S. Lubar proffers two suggestions: the first is that the title obscures the regional rivalries in a match between an elite team from the capital and a team from the south-west, ‘teams that represented the two social poles’ of French rugby, with Toulousain being comprised of ‘small town players’.25 The second is that international rugby could be a source of national pride, referring to the first French victory over the Scottish team.26 Both are convincing only up to a point. While there were undoubted rivalries between clubs in the south-west and Paris, the unusual thing about The Cardiff Team as a title is that it specifies a team at all. None of the works by Rousseau, Gleizes or Lhote studied in this chapter does so, and if Delaunay had wanted to remove any suggestion of regional rivalry he could have done so by simply opting for a more formulaic title, as they did, such as The Football Match. Nobody at the Indépendants in March 1913 would have thought to connect it to a particular photograph of a rugby match (one of many) appearing in La Vie au Grand Air a couple of months before. Moreover, the spread of rugby to the south-west partially relied on Parisian graduates and their social circle. Thierry 93

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Terret, historian of French rugby, actually contrasts Bordeaux and Toulouse with the emergence of a ‘village-centred rugby’ in Aquitaine. In the cities of the southwest, the ‘intellectual and industrial middle classes still predominated’, and he reveals that Stade Toulousain’s championship team included ‘seven University students, one manufacturer, one pharmacist, one city hall secretary, one salaried employee, two vetenarians and two soldiers’.27 Although one must be alive to nuances in perception between being a pharmacist in the provinces and in Paris, these occupations are broadly equivalent to those of their Parisian opponents. The appeal to international rugby is also compromised, primarily because Cardiff is not a national team, but a club side. Although rugby undoubtedly was used to inspire patriotic feeling, it is difficult to ascertain how a painting of a Welsh club side evokes memories of the French victory over Scotland. Moreover, that victory was now two years in the past. At the start of 1913, however, there had been a much more embarrassing incident, when the French had not only lost 21–3 at home to the Scottish, but many of the crowd had invaded the pitch, incensed by the decisions of the English referee, Mr Baxter. ‘L’affaire Baxter’, as it became known, ran contrary to all the notions of sportsmanship that the USFSA promoted and forced the organisation into apologies to the other competitors in the Five Nations. This was not enough to appease the Scots, who broke off sporting relations with the French until after the Great War. Although these disturbances perhaps held some appeal for Delaunay, it is again unlikely that a visitor to the Indépendants would make the connection. All such explanations must, as Lubar acknowledges, be speculative. Nevertheless, Cardiff Rugby Football Club was well known in Paris. One of its former players, George Yewlett, had become trainer of Stade Français, and in February 1912 the two teams met, with Cardiff running out 19–3 victors. Matches against British club opposition had long held a significant position in French rugby, dating back to the first encounter between Stade Français and Rosslyn Park in 1892, and offered a yardstick by which French teams could measure themselves. As Rousseau and Lubar note, Delaunay’s title might well refer specifically to an article he had clipped from L’Echo des Sports of 8 January 1913, ‘La partie de Cardiff’ and current debates about French teams’ inferiority to their British counterparts.28 Furthermore, rugby’s development in Britain presaged its regional development in France. Rugby in Wales carried few elitist associations. Cardiff’s captain when they played Stade Français, Louis Dyke, for example, worked at the city’s docks. Cardiff also provided many of the players for Wales’s successful international side, which lost only once in competition between 1908 and 1911. The Cardiff Team as a title allows Delaunay simultaneously to connote populism, success, exoticism and internationalism. Lubar has called the third version of The Cardiff Team ‘a public manifesto’ of Delaunay’s artistic ambitions and thinks that the hoarding bearing his name testifies ‘to the artist’s position as the organizing agent of modernity, which the painting, itself a kind of panneau réclame, advertises’.29 What exactly the painting 94

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is a manifesto for, or what Delaunay’s agency in organising modernity was, is open to dispute. It certainly was not a painting promoting existing varieties of cubism. Delaunay’s relationship to Picasso and Georges Braque had always been antipathetic; he was far closer to the salon cubists around Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, having shown work in the infamous Room 41 of the Salon des Indépendants of 1911. However, by the time of their exhibition La Section d’Or in October 1912, he was distancing himself from them. In a letter to the critic Louis Vauxcelles, published in Gil Blas, he disputed the description of him as a creator of cubism and said that ‘some young painters’ had made use of his ‘earlier studies’. These painters ‘have recently exhibited some canvases that they call cubist. I am not exhibiting. Only some friends, some artists and critics know the direction that my art has followed,’ he continued, thereby implying that if he had ever been a cubist, he was one no longer.30 In fact, as Maurice Raynal noted in connection with the exhibition, cubism itself was developing in different directions, so that ‘it now seems very difficult to place all those represented under a single label’, and as a result, ‘the term cubists is losing meaning day by day, assuming it ever had a well-defined one’.31 In 1913 Delaunay preferred to refer to his art as ‘simultaneism’, which he dated to the Windows series. In defining that term, he invoked ‘the factories, the bridges, the ironworks, dirigibles, the incalculable movement of airplanes, windows simultaneously seen by crowds. These modern sensibilities converge simultaneously,’ a formulation that resembles The Cardiff Team at the same time that it draws on the Windows, certain works by Rousseau and modern poetry by Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars.32 Retrospectively, he saw The Cardiff Team as a breakthrough moment, the ‘first great achieved application of color to a large surface’. He distinguished it from his large-scale, more cubist work at the Indépendants of the year before: ‘It was no longer the Ville de Paris, which was cut up and shattered. The surface of the picture is living and simultaneous. The whole picture is a unity of rhythms. Modern elements: the poster, the Grande Roue. La Tour was part of a football game, bodies tangled up with life. Their relations in space, their movement was part of the larger movement of the picture – not dead and descriptive parts, which atrophy the breath of life yielded by the larger vision of the work.’33 One of the critics who was close to Delaunay was, however, Apollinaire. Certainly he was aware of the latest developments in Delaunay’s art; he lived with the Delaunays for over a month towards the end of 1912. His own poem ‘Les Fenêtres’ was about Delaunay’s Windows series and was commissioned by Der Sturm, appearing in an album published to mark Delaunay’s exhibition in Berlin. The pair travelled together to Germany, where Apollinaire gave a lecture at the gallery. But Apollinaire initially believed that, rather than breaking with cubism, Delaunay was in fact the leading representative of a new type of cubism, which he baptised ‘orphic cubism’. Apollinaire formulated the term during 1912, the year in which he wrote Les Peintres cubistes (The Cubist Painters), one of the most important accounts of cubism, owing to Apollinaire’s familiarity with not 95

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only Delaunay but both the salon cubists and the bande à Picasso. The work did not appear until March 1913, the month in which Delaunay exhibited The Cardiff Team at the Indépendants. At the same time that Apollinaire was lauding The Cardiff Team, his short book was also positioning orphic cubism as one of the two ‘pure’ tendencies of cubism, alongside the ‘scientific cubism’ of Picasso, Braque, Metzinger, Gleizes, Marie Laurencin and Juan Gris. It should ‘offer simultaneously a pure aesthetic pleasure, a construction obvious to the senses, and a sublime significance, namely the subject. It is pure art.’34 Apollinaire’s categories were perhaps never intended to be watertight, and in particular he allowed the protean Picasso to appear in both scientific cubism and orphic cubism. But even when Picasso is adduced to orphic cubism, it is one of the rare occasions in the book where he is not accorded primacy: ‘The light in Picasso’s works contains that art, discovered, for its part, by Robert Delaunay, and toward which Fernand Léger, Francis Picabia, and Marcel Duchamp are also striving.’35 Apollinaire’s book continues with his assessment of various cubist artists. Delaunay is again mentioned as an influence on Picabia and Duchamp.36 Apollinaire, however, offers no extended treatment of Delaunay, because he planned a further book devoted solely to orphism, now conceived not so much as a variant on cubism, but an entity in its own right.37 While Les Peintres cubistes was in press, Apollinaire continued to modify his conception of orphism, possibly taking into account Delaunay’s public disassociation with the cubists exhibiting at the Section d’Or. On the German trip with Delaunay, he produced a new statement on orphism, ‘Die Moderne Malerei’ (Modern Painting), delivered as his lecture for the exhibition and subsequently published in Der Sturm in February 1913. Here Apollinaire considerably broadened the scope of orphism, transforming it from a branch of cubism to become a potential rival to it, one that was also capable of assimilating both Italian futurism and German expressionism. Apollinaire’s essay identifies ‘on the one hand, Picasso’s cubism, and on the other Delaunay’s Orphism’ as the two most important ‘new tendencies in modern painting’.38 The followers of Picasso are identical to the list that would appear in Les Peintres cubistes: Braque, Metzinger, Gleizes, Gris and ‘certain works by Marie Laurencin’.39 But orphism has considerably expanded. Others of Laurencin’s works can now be considered orphist. Picabia and Duchamp are still present, but also: The most interesting German painters, such as Kandinsky, Marc, Meidner, Macke, Jan Censky, Münter, Otto Freundlich, etc. – belong instinctively – to this movement. The Italian futurists, who developed out of the fauves and cubism but who did not think it was right to abolish all perspectival and psychological conventions, also belong to Orphism.40

This expansion was necessarily controversial. Several of the German artists had contact with Delaunay and he was influential on them, but the Italian futurists were a different case. Moreover, Gino Severini recalled that the Futurists felt slighted by their treatment in Apollinaire’s book, where they are mentioned only 96

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in the concluding note and Severini and Umberto Boccioni are placed in one of the ‘impure’ categories of cubism, ‘instinctive cubism’.41 Instinctive cubists, Apollinaire writes ‘are lacking in lucidity and in artistic belief’ and the term covers ‘a very large number of artists’, all of whom base their work on impressionism.42 If the futurists are neglected and scorned in Apollinaire’s book, then they are simply incorporated in the Der Sturm essay. Delaunay himself viewed Apollinaire’s initial categorisation of orphism as a variant of cubism as misleading, claiming that simultaneism was ‘actually universal’, but at the same time being careful to distinguish it from the simultaneity propounded by the futurists, which he viewed as ‘classical and passé’.43 Later he came to view Apollinaire’s construction of orphism as an attempt to ‘create a homogenous group with which to rally artistic youth to a single aesthetic movement’ and to ‘mold the turmoils and inquiries of artists into a solid mass, a single front before the incomprehension of art lovers and the general public. He assimilated, in a sense more political than artistic, this birth of color.’44 This is probably accurate, although, as we have seen in chapter one, whether it was Delaunay or the futurists who were responsible for this birth of colour was a hotly debated topic in 1913. It was with this expanded conception of orphism that Apollinaire approached the Indépendants in 1913. He wrote appreciatively of another work on display there, Albert Gleizes’s Football Players (plate 6), hailing it as a further example of orphism. For Apollinaire, the exhibition marked the group manifestation of the movement. In addition to Delaunay, amongst the painters who ‘for the first time are exhibiting canvases that fall under the heading of aesthetic orphism’ are Léger, the American Patrick Henry Bruce, Laurencin, Gleizes and Metzinger.45 Both Gleizes and Metzinger had previously been amongst the strictest adherents of what Apollinaire termed scientific cubism, and had never been invoked by him in any other context. In L’Intransigeant he praised Football Players for its ‘great striving towards light and movement; it is a dense composition, difficult in conception and execution. But everything in it – except perhaps certain little flowers – is new and vigorous.’46 He was even more extravagant in his review of the Salon for Montjoie!, Ricciotto Canudo’s self-styled ‘organ of French artistic imperialism’: With his Football Players, Albert Gleizes has taken an enormous stride forward. This is his most diverse and richly coloured painting. In the upper portion, I still see a few unpleasant heavy blurs, but the composition is varied and new. Gleizes undertook a difficult composition, which he has succeeded in ordering like a master. The subject has come back into painting, and I am more than a little proud to have foreseen the return of what constitutes the very basis of pictorial art. The subject of Gleizes’s canvas is elan.47

In the two previous issues of Montjoie!, Gleizes himself had contributed an essay, ‘Cubism and Tradition’, that upheld a distinctively French tradition of painting, with cubism as its latest incarnation. In Gleizes’s account this tradition, 97

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based on the Celtic and the Gothic, was subverted by the importation of the Italian renaissance. Behind the anti-renaissance argument, it is not hard to discern the warnings against a similar importation of Italian futurism, most markedly in his closing claim that ‘painting must not live off foreign elements … it would be a grave error to believe it could express its age solely by depicting everyday episodes, anecdotes, picturesqueness, any more than that, by painting flywheels, tie rods, and pistons, it could evoke the lyricism of the machine’.48 As David Cottington has observed, there is a certain dehiscence between Gleizes’s writing and his painting at this point.49 His argument about an essential French tradition in painting seems far more suited to previous works such as A la Cuisine, 1911, or Les Baigneuses, 1912, than to the Football Players, based as it is on an English game that had been imported to France, and the appeal to modernity of its incorporation of the girders of the bridge. Iron bridges had operated as a signifier of modern France since the time of the impressionists. Gleizes had already treated them in the Les Ponts de Paris (Passy), 1912 and the similarity of the bridge there suggests that Passy is also the location for the rugby picture, especially as the district was home to the Parc des Princes, where Stade Français played its home matches.50 The blue jersey of the man driving with the ball might indicate that Stade is one of the teams. In a subtle touch, the girder pattern is echoed on the tops of the socks of those trying to tackle him, reinforcing this link between modern architecture and modern sport. As was seen in the case of Metzinger’s At the Cycle-Race Track, for all the protestations of the French artists, the introduction of highly coloured, large-scale works with a sporting theme does appear to be a response to the previous year’s Italian futurist exhibition in Paris, and was certainly viewed as such by the futurist Umberto Boccioni. Whereas Metzinger’s work could clearly be read as an appeal to nationalism, given the French dominance of that sport and the incorporation of the tricolour, this is less obviously the case in Gleizes’s work. That nationalist project was Montjoie!’s own, despite the periodical’s being edited by an Italian, and its publication of the work of the assimilated Pole Apollinaire. Although grouped together by Apollinaire, Gleizes’s theoretical insistence on the relationship between French painting and cubism nevertheless seems at odds with Delaunay’s decision to incorporate internationalism in The Cardiff Team, where the artist has decided that one team is Welsh. Delaunay’s original advertising hoarding reads ‘Magic’ rather than the French ‘Magique’, echoing the way in which Magic City presented itself as a venue for the international dance craze of the tango. It is subsequently replaced by the sign that proclaims Delaunay himself an international figure. Rugby during war time Although perhaps inconsistent with his theories, Gleizes’s painting is not the only example of a cubist painting of rugby being harnessed to an argument about nationalism and French painting. André Lhote painted rugby or soccer repeatedly

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between 1917 and 1920, producing three major canvases of a metre or more in height and several smaller oils. Of the two models of rugby paintings available to him from the 1913 Indépendants, Gleizes’s work would undoubtedly have been the more appealing. Lhote had shown with the salon cubists before the First World War, including at the Section d’Or exhibition. The critic Olivier Hourcade paired the two artists together as representatives of Gascony, writing that both were interested not in revolution, but in reaction. Despite distortions, ‘Lhote’s and Gleizes’s canvases convey their models, because they display, not their fleeting aspects, but their essential character.’51 Both were, for Hourcade, engaged in an enterprise ‘to show in an original way the profound truths of a race, a country, or, more generally, of matter’.52 Lhote did indeed often take his native Bordeaux and its environs as his subject. As we have seen, this was also rugby’s provincial heartland. During the war, he divided his time between Paris and Le Piquey, a small fishing village on the bay of Arcachon near to Bordeaux. The location was a significant artistic one during the conflict. Lhote organised a place for Severini to stay in a neighbouring village in 1917 and the Italian wrote of visiting Lhote and Jean Cocteau.53 The following year Diego Rivera and Amédée Ozenfant were also in the area.54 By this time Lhote had already written a significant essay, ‘Totalisme’, for Ozenfant’s war-time journal L’Elan.55 Published in February 1916, it set out his view that cubism had pushed the rational techniques of Cézanne to their limits, but had also introduced an undue emphasis on personality and this had often resulted in a movement that was at once too dependent on deploying poorly digested systematic techniques and too experimental. The war offered a chance to make an evaluation of these works and to determine the way forward. One further constituency is important to consider before moving to an analysis of Lhote’s pictures of rugby. He was close to the group that had established the Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF). From 1919 he would write a series of essays published there that further outlined and refined his views on modern art, which I will discuss below. But the NRF was more than a publication vehicle for his essays. André Gide and Maurice Denis, both major figures in the NRF, collected Lhote’s work. Jacques Rivière, the NRF’s editorial secretary from 1912, was instrumental in securing Lhote’s first one-man show in Paris, at the Galerie Druet in 1910. Moreover, he reviewed it favourably in the NRF, concentrating on Lhote’s ‘love of construction’, inherited from Paul Cézanne.56 Shortly after Hourcade’s essay pairing Gleizes and Lhote was published, Rivière wrote a noted piece in which he separated the pair by arguing that the cubists themselves had misunderstood the nature of cubism.57 Promoting the cubist abolition of lighting and perspective, Rivière maintained that something new had to be established in their place. The task of the new painting was to represent ‘objects as they are, that is, rather than how we see them’ (SLT, 252). In other words, in abolishing external lighting and perspective, the painter must penetrate through the world of contingent appearances in order to grasp the object’s essence. But the cubists, in Rivière’s view, had a mistrust of hierarchies, which led them to paint all of

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the faces of an object without any regard for which best represented it. They ‘no longer dare cut anything from reality’ (SLT, 264). To compound this, they elevate the space between objects into ‘new objects, entirely imaginary’ (SLT, 265). The closing pages of the essay are peppered with pejorative estimations of the cubists and their works: objects form an ‘inexplicable continuity’ (SLT, 265); the painters’ ‘refusal to intervene in any way is unacceptable’ (SLT, 264); ‘the elements of their pictures engage in anarchy and form the mad cacophony we find so laughable’ (SLT, 264). ‘In short, the cubists seem to be parodying themselves’ (SLT, 265). Nevertheless, the cubists remain important because ‘there is something that transcends them, an all-powerful necessity in the evolution of painting, more truth than it is possible for them to perceive at first glance’ (SLT, 250). In a redemptive phrase, they should be forgiven because ‘they know not what they do’ (SLT, 266). Concluding the essay, Rivière names his targets for the first time, including Picasso, Braque, Gleizes and Delaunay. Although other painters are held out as promising, Rivière concludes his essay by heralding Lhote: ‘Finally, I shall single out André Lhote, whose recent works, in my view, mark, with admirable simplicity, the decisive advent of the new painting’ (SLT, 267). Cottington reinforces Rivière’s distinction between Lhote and the other cubists at the same time as rejecting its implications for any ‘new painting’: ‘Of all those associated with cubism Lhote was, as his work of 1911–12 clearly shows, the most classically inclined, the most entrenched in an orientation to the French tradition of Claude and Poussin that obstructed his access to the modernist and progressive impulses within cubism.’58 The group around the NRF is relevant for another reason: their love of rugby. In 1913 Rivière and his brother-in-law, the writer Alain-Fournier, formed the Club Sportif de la Jeunesse Littéraire, which also included the rugby enthusiasts Jean Giraudoux, Pierre Mac Orlan and Gaston Gallimard – the publisher and founder of the NRF.59 Cottington has characterised the NRF’s position as ‘a “modern classicism” … which … balanced an attitude of openness to the experiments of a new generation with an insistence upon ordered and finished compositions.’60 As we will see, this position is borne out in Lhote’s works dealing with rugby. Rugby itself could be aligned with this view of aesthetics, as it too constituted a radical innovation (the importation of a foreign sport) within a classical conservative framework (a concern for French masculinity and anxiety over military prowess, itself set within broader nationalist concerns). Lhote’s first large painting, Rugby (plate 7), like Delaunay’s work, shows a lineout. A player raises his arm towards an unseen ball, while others compete or look on. There is no consistency over the team jerseys; although two players wear quartered shirts, suggesting a link back to Harlequin from the commedia delle arte, but also the English team Harlequins, these shirts do not match. Other players wear striped or block colour tops. On the other hand, the composition is strictly and classically governed, with the jumping player’s head meeting the edge of the canvas in accordance with the golden section (that is to say, two-thirds of the way in from the left-hand side). The equivalent point at the bottom of 100

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the painting is the point of departure for a strong diagonal. Where this meets the right-hand edge, another diagonal sets off at right angles to form the top edge of a rectangle, continued by the arm of one of the players wearing the squared shirts and the shoulder of the leaping man. Continued down to the lower left by the side of this player and then by a thick black area of paint, the suggestion of a rectangle is completed by the right-hand edge of the small, green-shaded triangle at the picture’s lower left. The dimensions of this appear also to have been determined by the golden section (its bottom right corner is an eighth of the way across the canvas). This rectangle acts as a ground for most of the action of the players, who themselves form a rough triangle in their upward movement. A second, opposed, more minor diagonal is composed by the green player with his arm raised at the upper left of the composition, whose body aligns perfectly with the side of the church behind him. The painting, then, is very ordered, and although one-point perspective is not employed, there is also an order to the way in which the incidental features of the work are distributed around the edge of these central diagonals: some distant players, a wood, and a stone bridge, behind which rises the conservative symbol of the church. Although there has clearly been sand mixed with the paint to give texture to some areas and Lhote employs the rough dotting technique that Picasso had been using since the end of 1913, these borrowings do not override what is the picture’s essential claim to be continuing a much longer and less novel tradition. Recalling the painting, Lhote spoke of ‘its mural character’. He did not claim to be following Picasso but, rather, Fra Angelico, and the experimentation which he had argued against in ‘Totalisme’ had been replaced by a return to the ‘basics’, in line with the ‘severity of the times’.61 As we have seen, rugby often connoted modernity, but it also carried a more conservative emotional charge, especially during the Great War. It was adopted in France in part for what it was hoped it could provide through developing preparedness for war, and when that war came the sport was valorised by its advocates for the bravery of its players-turned-soldiers. In order to explore further the status of rugby during the First World War, I want to look at its treatment in the periodical La Vie au Grand Air, the source of Delaunay’s photograph. Published as a weekly magazine from 1898 by Pierre Lafitte, it was undoubtedly the most visually arresting of France’s sporting publications before the Great War, notable particularly for its extensive use of photography. Publication was suspended at the outset of the war, but it re-emerged as a quarterly from June 1916. In his editorial to the reborn title, Lafitte wrote that the journal would be half devoted to text, with the other half comprising photographs, drawings, plans, tables and visual comparisons that would allow the reader the best understanding of the thoughts of their contributors and the best grasp of the techniques of each sport.62 The magazine was not a mouthpiece for the USFSA, and it devoted at least as much space to professional sports not under control of the USFSA, especially cycling, boxing and horse racing, sports which were viewed by the USFSA with ambivalence or mistrust. I have chosen to examine it in 101

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relation to Lhote’s works not because it is especially neutral but, rather, because, nevertheless, it propounds a philosophy broadly akin to that of the USFSA, especially in a series of articles titled ‘What the Future of Athleticism Will Be’, written by Charles de Saint-Cyr, another literary figure with sporting interests.63 Moreover, as a quarterly, it is not particularly concerned with recording results or reporting on such games as are still being played, but instead devotes itself to commemorating those sportsmen who had died fighting for France, to linking sports training to military training, to predicting trends and to making arguments, often doing so visually. The first part of Saint-Cyr’s essay is specifically concerned with the USFSA. The ‘Athleticism’ of his title encompasses soccer, running, swimming, lawn tennis and other sports under the control of the organisation, but the essay begins with two rugby teams. Taking Racing Club and Stade Français as his examples, he traces the fate of twenty-three players and officials from Racing Club and a further thirteen from Stade Français. Ostensibly these two teams were chosen because they had contested the final Parisian championship before the war (the southerners of Perpignan had taken the national championship), but in reality, as we have seen, the two oldest and most socially exclusive clubs had been instrumental in the founding of the USFSA. A table shows the players’ fates during the war: six dead and five wounded from Racing Club (two more served as an American ambulance man and an English army medic); the players of Stade Français had fared a little better, with none dead and three wounded (a further player was a lieutenant in the English army). Sundry commendations and medals are also noted.64 Of course, more would be killed before the end of the conflict, and death rates generally for rugby players were higher than normal: Dine states that twenty-three of 111 capped French internationals died during the war, a rate that is not only well above the national average, but which even exceeds that of traditional military recruitment areas.65 It is telling that when Saint-Cyr wishes to provide evidence for his argument linking physical and moral health in the service of patriotic duty, it is rugby to which he turns first. He interviews the Honorary President of Racing Club and the USFSA, Michel Gondinet, also including tables showing the USFSA’s rapid growth, with three hundred thousand members, eighteen hundred affiliated societies and thirty-three regional committees on the eve of the war. Upholding a view of both sport and war as noble activities, Gondinet categorically ruled out any resumption of Franco-German sporting relations, because the Germans were not ‘gentlemen’, which he explained was ‘a good, beautiful English word that represents a good, beautiful thing, because it personifies honour and loyalty’.66 This view of war as the continuation of sport by other means is most forcefully put in ‘Good Sportsman – Good Soldier’, an essay by the champion swimmer Henry Deçoin. Writing from the trenches, Deçoin portrays the war as the 1916 Olympic games, urging his readers to open their eyes to the contest for final victory taking place between ‘the cream of their races’ in an ‘immense stadium’. French

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success would achieve ‘the liberty of peoples, the liberation of the territory, the vengeance of our brothers who died as heroes’.67 Deçoin’s essay is accompanied by a visual comparison between an athlete putting a shot and a French soldier throwing a grenade from a trench. Further comparisons stress other ways in which sport has prepared men for war.68 Soldiers who are sportsmen are better trained to reach their objective and are less likely to succumb to illness or drunkenness. ‘The sportsman is not ill. He is wounded or killed. That is all.’69 Ironically, given his enthusiasm for rugby, Lhote had joined the army at the beginning of the war, but had been discharged on medical grounds ‘almost immediately’.70 The players of the sport were often the subject of the obituaries carried in La Vie Au Grand Air. That for Marc Giacardy, a French international and the captain of Stade Bordelais, killed in a French offensive at Verdun in 1917, was written by his fellow international Maurice Boyau, who had captained France but was now an air ace (and would himself die towards the end of the war). Boyau stressed how leading Bordelais had already prepared Giacardy to take charge of a military company.71 Stade Bordelais was, of course, Lhote’s home team, and Rugby dates both to the year of Giacardy’s death and the year that Lhote returned to artistic production.72 There need not be a specific connection between the event and the picture, as at the time that Lhote painted Rugby the game was being presented as the ultimate sport of sacrifice. For its advocates, rugby’s players took the lessons learnt on the pitch about comradeship, working towards a common goal, bravery, and persistence even in the face of adversity, and allied them to the physical attributes of strength, agility and endurance that the game encouraged and developed, in order to produce the ideal French soldier. That so many elite players were killed or wounded in battle was a confirmation, rather than a condemnation, of the values of the sport. Lhote, as someone with an interest in rugby and as a recent soldier, could hardly be unaware of this, and was in all probability in full sympathy with these views. The painting can be read as a visual elegy, the players, so many of whom were dead or injured, are here fit and active. Delaunay’s signifiers of metropolitan Paris have been replaced by motifs that are both less urban and contemporary. The blue of the sky, the green of the grass with its verdant bushes at the lower right, the church, and the distant players, in solidarity with their counterparts in the foreground, all reinforce that it is a way of life, one that marries religion, physical activity and an attachment to the French land, that is at stake in the conflict. However, rugby towards the end of the war was also a sport in crisis. As well as the high mortality rate among leading players, the war also facilitated a rise in interest in soccer. Although heralding a revival of interest in the sport, ‘Controverse sur le rugby’, written by Racing Club player Géo André in 1918, acknowledges that the game had faced difficulties: ‘Why was rugby abandoned, while soccer escaped this neglect?’73 The final part of Saint-Cyr’s essay on the future of athleticism takes the form of responses to an enquiry addressed to advocates of both soccer and rugby. Under the subheading ‘Football, after the

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trenches, will have to conquer the schools – all must support it’, Saint-Cyr notes that rugby faces specific problems due ‘the enormous losses’ of the war, which have left ‘almost all’ the clubs ‘in disarray’.74 Responding to this situation, Maurice Mathieu, the Secretary General of Stade Français, called for a propaganda campaign, while also setting out his view that the ‘players of rugby constitute, in my view, a sporting elite and in consequence their number will always be limited’.75 Louis Dedet, a former Stade player who scored the try in the first championship and went on to represent France, now a headmaster, advocates concentrating efforts on high school scholars and university students, once again emphasising the link between the sport and preparation for war.76 By contrast, those representing soccer seem to revel in its new-found popularity. Saint-Cyr asks whether ‘soccer, which has perhaps suffered less than rugby from the war, will maintain the same level of popularity after the campaign?’ His respondents were positive that it would. Jean Ducret, the French captain, spoke of increased numbers of clubs and players since the start of the war, claiming that all the regiments now had soccer teams and that those who did not play were keen to watch the matches. He viewed the sport as now being on an equal footing with rugby.77 Henri Beau, a former French international goalkeeper, also stressed the populist character of soccer. The game should continue its propaganda efforts addressed to ‘all our young’, and organise ‘attractive contests and big matches intended to draw in the general public’.78 The inclusion of the appeals to a broad cross-section of the public, and the emphasis on the importance of the crowd, signals a very different constituency from the respondents representing rugby, with their efforts directed towards a select elite amongst the schools and universities. Yet the two sports were not mutually exclusive. Lhote himself painted several smaller works which took soccer as their theme at this time. The players in Les Footballeurs, c. 1918 (figure 27), are certainly playing with a round ball and the white posts of a soccer goal are visible in the background, as well as curving pitch markings. The arrangement of the players might owe something to the example of Gleizes, with the player with the ball flanked by two players on either side who pursue him. In contrast to Rugby, with its harmonious and conservative setting, the game here is played against a more urgent and clamorous backdrop consisting of fragmented advertising hoardings, reminiscent of those used by Delaunay. There is also the suggestion of a covered stand for spectators, with vertical posts and a curved roof. These elements combine to give the work a more urban and commercial feel than Rugby.79 In its overt concern with such symbols of modernity the picture is an unusual one in Lhote’s career. He might have been led to incorporate them by soccer’s broad appeal as much as their precedents in the works of Gleizes and Delaunay. In fact, Lhote allied his general approach to both those artists in his essay ‘The Two Cubisms’, one of a number of important pieces that he contributed at the time to the Nouvelle Revue Française, describing how what he calls ‘the emotional cubists … start from a sensation’.80 He placed himself alongside Delaunay and Gleizes as representatives of this 104

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27  André Lhote, Les Footballeurs, c. 1918

current, counterposing it to ‘pure cubism’, epitomised by Braque, Gris, Severini and Metzinger amongst others (a list not too dissimilar to Apollinaire’s in Les Peintres cubistes). Pure cubists take ‘objects as their example only in the last resort; they project their plastic dreams on to the object as on to a screen’.81 Emotional cubists, on the other hand start with the object: ‘Léger with a picture of a Paris street, where the walls, by reason of the animation given to them by their covering of many posters, seemed to move … There was Gleizes with his circuses, where the dancers and the clowns radiate movements around them like waves. … Here the object, street, circus, bar or harbour, exists before the dreams; it awakes them, it arouses them.’82 If it is a struggle to find similar signifiers of modernity in Lhote’s other work, then we might concur with Christopher Green’s view that the essay was a vehicle in which Lhote could ‘fit his analytical, nature-based version of Cubism into a reassuringly nationalist view of tradition, and to remove the synthetic, the “pure” Cubism of Picasso, Gris and their French allies into the more doubtful category of foreign art’.83 Perhaps unsurprisingly, given its patrician ethos, the USFSA lost its control of sport shortly after the end of the First World War and was disbanded. Soccer did go on to enjoy an extremely rapid growth in France in the inter-war years. When the French Football Federation was founded in 1920 to replace the USFSA’s 105

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governance of the game it had around one thousand clubs; five years later that number had quadrupled. As Richard Holt comments on these figures: ‘Surely no other participant leisure activity has ever spread so quickly.’84 Yet rugby did not decline as a result. Its new governing body, the French Rugby Federation, also founded in 1920, resuscitated the sport from its war-time decline. According to Terret, rugby matches ‘quickly achieved remarkable popularity in the country and games played against teams from the British Isles drew tens of thousands of spectators to the stadiums. Major games even started to be broadcast on the radio in 1923, and the government, participating in the craze for the sport at the international level, suggested the filming of games that might further the nation’s image.’85 It was during this period that Lhote returned to rugby with a second major canvas, painted in 1920 and exhibited at the Salon d’Automne of 1923 with the title Football (figure 28). Lhote conceived the painting as a reworking on the earlier Rugby, telling Anatole Jakovsky: By 1920 joyfulness had returned, and for a brief moment one could reanimate austere wartime compositions with the happier atmosphere and spirit of profundity of the new era. I retook my 1917 composition and added a static figure and drifting clouds. The horizontal configuration of the clouds and the verticality of the isolated player stand out against the oblique lines of the group. Any painter who is free in his actions, who is not obliged to satisfy any external whim, who wishes to reinvent himself through the most noble means, in other words, through technique, should in the course of his life rework the same composition several times, in order to improve his craft, re-evaluate his feelings and confirm the state of his knowledge.86

As if in a nod to his description of Léger’s billboards in ‘The Two Cubisms’, written the same year, a sign proclaims ‘Event 12’. But this sign, placed horizontally and square to the picture plane, has none of the animation that he recognised in Léger, or that was evident in his own placement of the advertisements in Les Footballeurs along oblique and diagonal lines, with the full texts rendered unreadable. The addition of the static figure, a passive onlooker, places the viewer at a further remove from the action. On Green’s account, between 1918 and 1923, Lhote was the ‘main mentor’ of a ‘revived and tamed early cubism’ that the artist himself preferred to call ‘neo-cubism’.87 Football was shown in the last of those years. Although Lhote returned to the subject many times throughout his career, some of the urgency of the early paintings of rugby was lacking even by that point. The sport had become well established. It was no longer under the control of the USFSA and its ideological programme. The emotional charge that the war had given to a painting of rugby in 1917 was no longer there. Delaunay himself completed further versions of The Cardiff Team in 1922–23, but moved on to produce a series of works dealing with competitive runners, possibly inspired by the Parisian

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28  André Lhote, Football, 1920

Olympic games of 1924.88 Finally, even in returning to rugby in 1920, Lhote was not merely inserting himself in a lineage that included Rousseau, Gleizes and Delaunay, he was also contributing to what by now was a tradition of painted representations of sporting activities. Indeed, in 1937 Fernand Léger and Charlotte Perriand nodded to Delaunay by including a painter sizing up a view of leaping rugby players beneath the Eiffel Tower in their photomural for the Agricultural Pavilion at that year’s Exposition, a work that Romy Golan has read as expressing the ‘utopian conjunction … of city and country under the Popular Front’.89 Golan draws attention to the way in which Léger and Perriand’s work operates by portraying social harmony in the photomural form rather than disjunction, as might be expected from a photomontage. In the case of the rugby players, I would argue that this is achieved by their mediation through this figure of the painter. Away from painting, in the fields of film, photography, design and architecture, representations of sport were powerful ideological instruments and attempts were made across the political spectrum to deploy these as part of a concerted attempt to reimagine the world after the end of the First World War. It is to these attempts that I now turn.

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Notes 1 This is of course a very simplified account of the development of all three games in England. In particular rugby had a large following among the working classes in the south-west, and they were responsible for taking the sport across the border, establishing it in its Welsh heartland, where according to David Goldblatt, ‘the new professional classes turned their considerable entrepreneurial sporting energies to developing a cross-class, semi-professional but hidden, rugby union culture’. Goldblatt, The Ball is Round: A Global History of Football (London: Penguin, 2007) 41. Goldblatt’s early chapters are a brilliant synoptic account of the rise of soccer. Mike Huggins, The Victorians and Sport (Hambledon: Hambledon Continuum, 2004) is a nuanced sociological account of what was a stake in the various debates. 2 Philip Dine, French Rugby Football: A Cultural History (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 23. 3 Allen Guttmann, The Olympics: A History of the Modern Games (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 9. 4 Pierre de Coubertin, Une Campagne de 21 ans, quoted in translation by John J. MacAloon, This Great Symbol: Pierre de Coubertin and the Origins of the Modern Olympic Games (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 59. 5 The words of a plaque at Rugby School which commemorates Webb Ellis’ infamous (and probably apocryphal) action. 6 Richard Holt, Sport and Society in Modern France (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1981), 66. Nevertheless, the clubs did actually start to play soccer in the mid-1890s, albeit, as Holt points out, ‘rather reluctantly’ (67). 7 Thierry Terret, ‘Learning to Be a Man: French Rugby and Masculinity’, trans. Karen Tucker, in Making the Rugby World: Race, Gender, Commerce, eds Timothy J. L. Chandler and John Nauright (London: Frank Cass, 1999), 67. 8 Tristan Tzara, preface to Rousseau’s Une visite à l’exposition de 1889, quoted in translation in Nancy Ireson, ‘Tristan Tzara and the Plays of the Douanier Rousseau’, Burlington Magazine, September 2004, 618. 9 Dine, French Rugby, 28. 10 Dine, French Rugby, 42. 11 Dine, French Rugby, 44. 12 Delaunay painted three large canvases at this time: the first version is now in Eindhoven, the second in Munich, the third in Paris (hence the title ‘Troisième répresentation’ in the work shown at the Indépendants). Apollinaire bestowed his praise in a review for Montjoie!, 18 March 1913, 4, translated as ‘Through the Salon des Indépendants’, in Apollinaire on Art: Essays and Reviews, 1902–1918, ed. LeRoy C. Breunig, trans. Susan Suleiman (Boston: MFA Publications, 2001), 293. 13 See Claire Frèches-Thory, ‘From Sarcasm to Canonisation: Critical Fortune’, in Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris, eds Frances Morris and Christopher Green (London: Tate, 2005), 177. 14 Robert Delaunay, letter to Franz Marc, 11 January 1913, in Robert and Sonia Delaunay, The New Art of Color: The Writings of Robert and Sonia Delaunay, ed. Arthur A. Cohen, trans. David Shapiro and Arthur A. Cohen (New York: Viking, 1978), 122. 15 Delaunay, letter to Marc, 11 January 1913, 121. 16 Ireson, ‘Tristan Tzara and the Plays of the Douanier Rousseau’, 621. Ireson speculates that, in the light of Delaunay’s recent death, Tzara decided not to impute ‘any suggestion of mimicry’ to the younger artist. 108

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17 La Vie au Grand Air, 18 January 1913, 43, refers to the match as taking place ‘last Sunday’. A report of the match also appeared in L’Instransigeant, 13 January 1913, ‘SCUF contre Stade Toulousain’, 4. 18 Pascal Rousseau, Robert Delaunay, 1906–1914: De l’impressionisme à l’abstraction (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1999), 184. Rousseau also says that the Der Sturm exhibition opened on 27 January, but Willard Bohn both establishes the date of the opening as 17 January and places Delaunay in Germany with Apollinaire from roughly 14 January until 22 January. See his Apollinaire and the International Avant-Garde (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 82–5. 19 Unless otherwise stated, I rely here on Rousseau’s analysis of the source material for the works in Robert Delaunay, 184–9. 20 Robert Wohl, A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1908–1918 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 188. 21 Rousseau, Robert Delaunay, 188. 22 Dine, French Rugby, 46 23 Rousseau, Robert Delaunay, 188. Photographs of the match between Stade and Rosslyn Park are held at the French Bilbliothèque Nationale and can be viewed on-line (e.g. http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b6922370q, accessed 28 May 2016). 24 Apollinaire, ‘Through the Salon des Indépendants’, 291. 25 Robert S. Lubar, ‘Running with the Ball: Robert Delaunay, Pierre de Coubertin and Rugby Football in France’, in A Fine Regard: Essays in Honor of Kirk Varnedoe, eds Patricia G. Berman and Gertje R. Utley (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 145. My argument runs parallel with Lubar’s at some points; we are both indebted to Pascal Rousseau. 26 Lubar, ‘Running with the Ball’, 146. 27 Thierry Terret, ‘The Spread of Rugby in France: Sociability, Violence and the Break with Britain and Ireland’, conference paper delivered at ‘Allez Les Bleus’, World Rugby Museum, Twickenham, 3 September 2007, http://www.englandrugby.com/mm/ Document/General/General/01/30/39/49/thierry-terret-paper_Neutral.pdf, 3 (accessed 28 May 2016). 28 Rousseau, Robert Delaunay, 184, n. 2, Lubar, ‘Running with the Ball’, 146. The title must have been established by 11 January, since Delaunay refers to it by name in his letter to Marc of that date. 29 Lubar, ‘Running with the Ball’, 135. A panneau réclame is an advertising hoarding, the appearance of which was much debated in France at the time. See Jeffrey Weiss, The Popular Culture of Modern Art: Picasso, Duchamp and Avant-Gardism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 59–73, where The Cardiff Team is also mentioned. 30 Robert Delaunay, ‘Des origines de cubisme’, letter published in Gil Blas, 25 October 1912, 4, as translated in David Cottington, Cubism and its Histories (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 271, n. 87. 31 Maurice Raynal, ‘The “Section d’Or” exhibition’, in La Section d’Or. Numéro Spécial consacré à l’Exposition de la ‘Section d’Or’ 1, no. 1 (9 October 1912), translated by Janet Todd in A Cubism Reader: Documents and Criticism, 1906–1914, eds Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 333, 334. 32 Robert Delaunay, ‘Simultaneism in Contemporary Modern Art, Painting, Poetry (October 1913)’, The New Art of Color, 49. 33 Robert Delaunay, ‘Passage from Old Methods to New’, The New Art of Color, 14. The text is dated c. 1938 there. 109

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34 Guillaume Apollinaire, Les Peintres cubistes: Méditations esthétiques (Paris: Eugène Figuère [17 March], 1913), trans. Jane Marie Todd in A Cubism Reader: Documents and Criticism, 1906–1914, eds Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 486. 35 Apollinaire, Les Peintres cubistes, 486. 36 Apollinaire, Les Peintres cubistes, 508 for Picabia and 510 for Duchamp. 37 See LeRoy C. Breunig, ‘Introduction’ to Apollinaire on Art, xxvii. 38 Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Die Moderne Malerei’, Der Sturm (February 1913), trans. Jason Gaiger in A Cubism Reader: Documents and Criticism, 1906–1914, eds Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 472. 39 Apollinaire, ‘Die Moderne Malerei’, 474. 40 Apollinaire, ‘Die Moderne Malerei’, 475. 41 Gino Severini, The Life of a Painter: The Autobiography of Gino Severini, trans. Jennifer Franchina (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 120–3. Apollinaire defines instinctive cubism in Les Peintres cubistes, 486. Boccioni and Severini are listed under its adherents on 514. For completeness, the remaining variation of cubism is ‘physical cubism’, a tendency epitomised by Henri Le Fauconnier (see Apollinaire, Les Peintres cubistes, 486). 42 Apollinaire, Les Peintres cubistes, 486. 43 Delaunay, ‘Simultaneism’, 48. 44 Robert Delaunay, ‘Two Notes on Orphism (1930; 1928–30), The New Art of Color, 104, 107. 45 Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘The Salon des Indépendants on the Quai d’Orsay’, L’Intransigeant, 18 March 1913, Apollinaire on Art, 282. 46 Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Au Salon des Indépendants’, L’Intransigeant, 2 April 1913, Apollinaire on Art, 285. 47 Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘A Travers le Salon des Indépendants’, Special supplement to Montjoie! 3 (18 March 1913), 4. Translation slightly modified from that in Apollinaire on Art, 292. 48 Albert Gleizes, ‘La tradition et le cubisme’, Montjoie! 1, 2 (10 and 25 February 1913) translated in A Cubism Reader: Documents and Criticism, 1906–1914, eds Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 466. 49 David Cottington, Cubism in the Shadow of War: The Avant-Garde and Politics in Paris, 1905–1914 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 162. 50 The bridge here also resembles the Pont du Empalot at Toulouse, which would locate the action in French rugby’s emerging heartland of the south-west. However, work does not seem to have started on that structure before 1915. 51 Olivier Hourcade, ‘La tendance de la peinture contemporaine’, La Revue de France et des Pays Français 1 (February 1912), trans. Jane Marie Todd in A Cubism Reader: Documents and Criticism, 1906–1914, eds Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 222 (italics in the original). 52 Hourcade, ‘La tendance’, 223. 53 Severini, The Life of a Painter, 194. 54 Françoise Ducros, ‘Amédée Ozenfant: “Purist Brother” ’, L’Esprit Nouveau: Purism in Paris, 1918–1925, ed. Carol S. Eliel (Los Angeles and New York: Los Angeles County Museum of Art/ Harry N. Abrams, 2001), 76. Ducros seems mistaken in believing that Ozenfant’s time in the south-west overlapped with that of Severini. 110

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55 André Lhote, ‘Totalisme’, L’Elan 9 (February 1916), n.p. 56 Jacques Rivière, ‘Exposition André Lhote. Galerie Druet’, Nouvelle Revue Française 24 (July–December 1910), trans. Jane Marie Todd in A Cubism Reader: Documents and Criticism, 1906–1914, eds Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 90. 57 Jacques Rivière, ‘Sur la tendance actuelle de la peinture’, Revue d’Europe et d’Amérique (1 March 1912), trans. Jane Marie Todd in A Cubism Reader: Documents and Criticism, 1906–1914, eds Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008)r, 249–67. Further references will be given in parantheses as SLT followed by the page number. 58 David Cottington, ‘Cubism, Law and Order: The Criticism of Jacques Rivière’, Burlington Magazine (December 1984), 748. See also the discussion of the essay in his Cubism and Its Histories, 68–71. 59 Dine, French Rugby, 29. 60 Cottington, ‘Cubism, Law and Order’, 749. 61 André Lhote, quoted in Anatole Jakovsky, André Lhote: 48 reproductions commentées par le peintre (Paris: Floury, 1947), n.p., figure 19, where ‘à cette représentation son caractère mural’, and ‘la sévérité des temps incitait les artistes à ne se préoccuper que de l’essentiel’ both appear. 62 Pierre Lafitte, ‘Ce qu’a été la Vie au Grand Air avant la guerre; ce qu’elle sera pendant et après’, La Vie au Grand Air, 15 June 1916, 2. 63 Saint-Cyr was a member of Racing Club before he founded the Red Star club with Jules Rimet, who would later give his name to the first soccer World Cup trophy. He was also the leading poet of a tendency he called Intensism. 64 Charles de Saint-Cyr, ‘Quel sera l’avenir de l’athlétisme’, La Vie au Grand Air, 15 June 1916, 20. 65 Dine, French Rugby, 50. 66 ‘Il y aura pendant longtemps comme deux races d’hommes et comme deux mondes séparés l’un de l’autre. Le sport ne les réunira point: Il veut des «gentlemen», un bien beau mot anglais qui représente une bien belle chose, car il personnifie l’honneur et la loyauté.’ Saint-Cyr, ‘Quel sera l’avenir’, 21. 67 Sous-Lieutenant [Henry] Deçoin, ‘Bon Sportsman – Bon Soldat’, La Vie au Grand Air, 15 June 1916, 28: ‘Ouvrons les yeux et regardons: les Jeux Olympiques, les vrais, les grands, se déroulent en ce moment avec une intense furia. Les peuples ont versé dans l’immense stadium la crème de leur race pour la victoire finale. Et quelle victoire! Et quelle récompense! Le résultat au tableau d’affichage sera la liberté des peuples, la libération du territoire, la vengeance de nos frères morts en héros.’ 68 Troops charging from a trench are compared to the start of a cross-country race, troops crawling under barbed wire are compared to athletes crawling on all fours. Finally, a photograph of the cyclist Charles Crupelandt in a small cabin used by riders during six-day velodrome meetings is compared to a captain in his small cabin in the trenches. 69 Deçoin, ‘Bon Sportsman – Bon Soldat’, 29–30: ‘Celui qui a pratiqué l’athlétisme d’une manière active, qui a lutté, est toujours le meilleur soldat … regardez dans nos hôpitaux, les blessés mis à part, comptez, parmi les malades, les nombres des sportifs. Il est nul. Le sportif n’est pas malade. Il se fait blesser or tuer. C’est tout. … [I]l ne va pas boire, lui; c’est un tempérant volontaire. Il n’a pas besoin de chercher de l’énergie au fond d’un quart!’ 111

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70 Alexandre Mercereau, André Lhote (Paris: J. Povolozky, 1921), 21, describes Lhote as ‘[r]éformé presque aussitôt’ following his mobilisation in 1914. 71 Sous-Lieutenant [Maurice] Boyau, ‘Un Disparu: Giacardy’, La Vie au Grand Air, 15 December 1917, 17: ‘A cette époque, le Stade Bordelais n’avait qu’à paraître sur un terrain pour vaincre. Déjà à ce moment Giacardy savait commander; il enlevait son équipe comme plus tard il devait enlever sa glorieuse compagnie.’ 72 Mercereau, Lhote, includes no work from 1915 or 1916 in his list of ‘Principal Works’, 59–64. 73 Géo André, ‘Controverse sur le rugby’, La Vie au Grand Air, 15 June 1918, 14: ‘Pourquoi avait-on abandonné le rugby, tandis que l’association échappait à cet oubli?’ 74 Saint-Cyr, ‘Quel sera l’avenir de l’athlétisme’, La Vie au Grand Air, 15 September 1917, 34. The subheading reads: ‘Le football, après la tranchée, devra conquérir les écoles – tous doivent s’y employer’. Saint Cyr writes: ‘Le rugby a fait au cours de la guerre des pertes énormes et les équipes, qui devraient prêcher et assurer les initiation des jeunes, sont presque toutes désorganisées.’ 75 Saint-Cyr, ‘Quel sera l’avenir’, 34, quoting Maurice Mathieu: ‘Les joueurs de rugby constituent, à mon avis, une élite sportive et par conséquent leur nombre sera toujours restreint. C’est une raison pour que la propagande soit d’autant plus vive.’ 76 Saint-Cyr, ‘Quel sera l’avenir’, 34, quoting Louis Dedet: ‘Profitons – en pour tourner tous nos regards et concentrer tous nos soins sur les scolaires; que le rugby fasse partie – partie principale – de la préparation militaire; que l’Université soit enfin convertie à la formation par le sport.’ 77 Saint-Cyr, ‘Quel sera l’avenir’, 34, quoting Jean Ducret: ‘Le nombre des équipes n’a jamais été aussi élevé que depuis le début des hostilités. … Tous les régiments ont maintenant leurs équipes de football [soccer]. Ces pratiquent nouveaux sont de nombreuses et peut-être brillantes recrues qui, si elles ne pratiquent plus, formeront des « galeries » bien fournies.’ 78 Saint-Cyr, ‘Quel sera l’avenir’, 34, quoting Henri Beau: ‘continuer intensivement la propagande qui doit amener à la pratique du sport français toute notre jeunesse, organiser de belles épreuves et de grands matches destinés à attirer le grand public.’ 79 In addition to Les Footballeurs, Football, 1920, private collection, certainly depicts soccer, as one of the players is heading the ball. This might mean that another small work, Joueurs de Rugby, 1918, sold at Sotheby’s Paris on 4 December 2013, is mistitled, as one of its players also seems to be heading the ball. 80 André Lhote, ‘The Two Cubisms: II’, The Athenaeum, 30 April 1920, 579. Many of Lhote’s essays for the NRF appeared in translation in The Athenaeum within a short period of (and in some instances even preceding) their French publication. The French original is titled ‘Le Cubisme au Grand Palais’, NRF, 1 March 1920. 81 André Lhote, ‘The Two Cubisms’ [Part One], The Athenaeum, 23 April 1920, 548. 82 Lhote, ‘The Two Cubisms: II’, 579. 83 Christopher Green, Cubism and its Enemies: Modern Movements and Reaction in French Art, 1916–1928 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 65. Remarkably, Picasso is nowhere mentioned in ‘The Two Cubisms’. 84 Holt, Sport and Society in Modern France, 70. 85 Terret, ‘Learning to be a Man’, 79. 86 Lhote, quoted in Jakovsky, André Lhote, n.p, figure 22. I have slightly modified the translation that appeared when the work, now titled Les Joueurs de Rugby, was sold at Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern Sale, 3 May 2011, lot 50. The painting included 112

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in the book does not appear to be the 1920 original, but a later copy now in the Musée Antoine Lécuyer in Saint Quentin, presumably because Lhote did not have a photograph of the earlier work to hand. 87 Green, Cubism and Its Enemies, 63. Lhote uses the term neo-cubism in his essay ‘The Necessity of Theories’ [Part One], The Athenaeum, 17 October 1919, 1039. 88 One of these versions, dated 1922–23, is in the collection the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. 89 Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France Between the Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 121. The work is reproduced as fig. 132. Golan suggests the painter might be Léger. Given its large scale and utopian themes, the artist that Paul Signac includes as part of his In The Time of Harmony, 1893–95, is another possible source.

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4 Of gods and men: the Olympic games and its rivals

As befits a French nobleman, Pierre de Coubertin, the son of an artist who from 1846 regularly exhibited his academic painting at the French Salon, envisaged the Olympic games as a reinvigoration of an antique ideal that could serve as a model for contemporary France. The first of Charles de Coubertin’s Salon works was Discovery of the Laocoon, Rome 1506. The unearthed Hellenistic sculpture, depicting the Trojan priest and his sons attacked by snakes, immediately proved an inspiration for major artists of the Renaissance. But the subject held more than just a generalised appeal for the Coubertins; the sculpture had been found on the land of Felice de Fredi, a distant relation of the family. Late in his career, to coincide with the first modern Olympic games of 1896 that were his son’s major achievement, Charles painted his Allegory of Sport (figure 29), which Pierre subsequently used as the cover illustration for the official Olympic Review between 1901 and 1914. The painting’s message is uncomplicated. Divided into halves marked ‘Paris’ at upper left and ‘Athens’ in Attic script at upper right, the painting depicts the meeting of modern France and ancient Greece through sport. The sports on the left, arrogated beneath that symbol of modernity the Eiffel Tower, are marked by their modern character: yachting, cycling, polo, rowing, along with fencing. A rugby player (a sport not actually included in the first Olympics, but explicable given Pierre’s role in importing the sport to France) ascends a podium to receive the laurel wreath awarded by Athena. Behind her, dwarfing the Eiffel Tower, is the Erechtheum, part of the Acropolis complex. Symbolically, the Greek building towers over the modern industrial one, but the modern industrial here is construed as distinctively French, reflecting the foundation of the modern games by Coubertin at the Sorbonne Congress of 1894 (held in a room decorated by the neo-classicist Puvis de Chavannes). In general, the antique half of the composition takes precedence over the modern sportsmen, who emerge from the sea to pay homage to their forebears. It has recently been claimed that the ‘Olympic Games took over the position that was earlier occupied by French salon painting’ in its commitment to reinvigorating ‘the classical ideal of humanity on a mass scale’.1 114

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29  Charles Coubertin, Allegory of Sport, 1896

If that is the case, then the shared interests between father and son, between painter and sports enthusiast, provide a mechanism for explaining that shift. The modern Olympic games were brought about by a confluence of sometimes contradictory factors. Designed to promote international harmony, they relied on international competition, which at times enflamed tensions between nations, or encouraged nationalism. Self-consciously placing itself in the lineage of the ancient games, the revived version also relied heavily on technological advance, which enabled the competitors to travel internationally and facilitated communication within the modern bureaucracy that ran the games. The first games were held in 1896 in Athens, 115

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but the second and third games coincided with the World’s Fairs at Paris in 1900 and St Louis in 1904. Overlying de Coubertin’s admiration for the classical games was a high regard for the sporting culture of nineteenth-century English public (i.e. private) schools. As I discussed in relation to rugby in the previous chapter, de Coubertin developed this regard for the English school system as a consequence of his deliberations on how the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War could best be remedied, and cultivated it on a series of fact-finding trips during the 1880s, returning to begin what one of his biographers terms ‘the proselytization of France for school sports on the English model’.2 De Coubertin also saw the revived Olympics as a bulwark against disquieting aspects of nineteenth-century modernity: If we begin to study the history of our century we are struck by the moral disorder produced by the discoveries of industrial science. Life suffers an upheaval, people feel the ground tremble continually under their feet. They have nothing to hold on to, because everything around them is shifting and changing; and in their confusion, as though seeking some counterpoise to the material powers which rise like Cyclopean ramparts about them, they grope for whatever elements of moral strength lie scattered about the world. I think this is the philosophic origin of the striking physical renaissance in the nineteenth century.3

Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia As Allen Guttmann has pointed out, the Olympic games have always been political, and ‘the political vision institutionalized in the Olympics has always been inconsistent and contradictory’.4 Many of the contradictions identified above can also be traced in the most notorious piece of visual art associated with the Olympics, Leni Riefenstahl’s film of the Berlin games of 1936, Olympia. Coubertin’s last public pronouncement was to praise the ‘consecration’ of ‘restored Olympism and the works of the mind’ at the Berlin games, organised with ‘courage’ by Adolf Hitler, who had ensured their success by the ‘fiat of his will’.5 Riefenstahl’s film, released in 1938, a year after Coubertin’s death, is dedicated to the Baron. That dedication appears on an entablature situated in ancient Greece and, like Coubertin senior’s picture, the film begins by tracing the modern Olympics to its antique origins. This is accomplished both in space, with several shots of the torch being relayed from Olympia to Berlin, and in time, most notably in the famous metamorphosis of the ancient Greek statue Discobolus into the modern German discus thrower Erwin Huber (figure 30). The two tableaux, one prefacing the first half of the film (the ‘Festival of Nations’) and one prefacing the second (the ‘Festival of Beauty’) have naturally received more critical attention than the footage of the Olympics that follows them, although this is also far from a straight documentary. Whether or not Olympia is a film that employs a fascist aesthetic, or whether there can be such a thing as a fascist aesthetic, has been much debated. The question of a specifically fascist aesthetic has been on the agenda since Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, where the destruction of humanity is experienced as ‘an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the 116

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30  Still from Olympia (1938), directed by Leni Riefenstahl

situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic.’6 I will return to the question of the aesthetics of fascism in my conclusion, but Susan Sontag applied it specifically to Riefenstahl in her ‘Fascinating Fascism’.7 Quoting Riefenstahl as saying, ‘I am fascinated by what is beautiful, strong, healthy, what is living’, Sontag attacked Riefenstahl’s supporters for accepting this defence by aesthetics, rather than recognising her work as that of a ‘horrid propagandist’.8 Her view 117

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of Olympia is unequivocally that it is a work of propaganda: ‘In Olympiad, the richest visually of all her films, one straining scantily clad figure after another seeks the ecstasy of victory, cheered on by ranks of compatriots in the stands, all under the still gaze of the benign Super-Spectator, Hitler, whose presence in the stadium consecrates this effort.’9 What is not in doubt is that Olympia was dedicated to the founder of the modern games. Coubertin was not, of course, a fascist. But the film continued to enjoy the support of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) even after the Second World War; in 1948 Riefenstahl was awarded an Olympic Diploma and the American Olympic Association organised private screenings of the film in the absence of US distribution.10 Such facts disrupt a simple reading of the work as perverting Olympianism, or a hijack of the games for political propaganda. On the other hand, the funding trail does lead back to the Nazi regime, it premiered on 20 April 1938, which was Hitler’s birthday, and the film was certainly used for propaganda purposes. In a fascinating re-reading of the aesthetic sources and background ideologies of the film, Michael Mackenzie has proposed that, rather than a fascist aesthetic, the style that Riefenstahl employs owes much to photographic pictorialism: In fact the entire opening sequence uses the dramatic chiaroscuro, rich coloristic tonal ranges, and shallow depth of field that characterized art photography at the turn of the century (rather than the ‘New Vision’ photography, of the twenties or thirties) and that carried with it connotations of introspection, profound aesthetic delectation, non-rational association, in a word: Kultur.11

I too will contrast Riefenstahl’s pictorialist style with that of the New Vision in what follows. Mackenzie links Riefenstahl’s aesthetic to her background in expressive dance (Ausdruckstanz) and an allegiance to Turnen gymnastic clubs. Turnen clubs favoured mass, non-competitive gymnastics over the Olympic variety. Indeed, one of de Coubertin’s impulses for studying competitive sport in the English public school was precisely his antipathy towards the German Turnen model. And the feeling was mutual. As a result of their training in the Turnen clubs, German gymnasts were highly successful in the early Olympics but were excluded by their clubs because they had taken part in competition.12 In a key passage of his essay, Mackenzie grounds Riefenstahl’s work in her background: It is my contention that claims to the effect that Riefenstahl’s fixation on the beautiful body and the classical are inherently fascistic, like the claim that the film exhibits a fascist aesthetic, are focused on the wrong issues. It is far-fetched to imagine that this filmmaker, who was uninterested in National Socialist ideology and unread and unschooled in its written expression, intuitively formulated, over the course of three-and-a-half hours of film shot on location under arduous circumstances and without the possibility of directing her actors, with black and Asian as well as white athletes, a visual equivalent for the convoluted, vague, 118

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and illogical racial theories of National Socialism. It is much more likely that her imagery was formed by her own ideologies and the cultural debates and theories that had characterized her own background. That background was in the Expressive Dance (or Ausdruckstanz) movement of the 1910s and 1920s, with its own murky ideology of the body. … Like other analysts of Olympia, I am convinced that beneath the mesmerizing rhythms and strikingly beautiful images of strong, graceful, athletic bodies there are subcutaneous enunciations of radically conservative import, enunciations about the body and the Volk. But I also think that they are not, or are not primarily, congruent with National Socialist racial ideology.13

Although I agree with much of Mackenzie’s argument, there are elements with which I take issue and, because of the nature of the debate, these deserve to be examined further. It is, for example, extremely odd to refer to the director of the overtly propagandistic Triumph of the Will, a personal associate of Hitler and Josef Goebbels, as ‘uninterested in National Socialist ideology and unread and unschooled in its written expression’, especially as its racial theories were, on Mackenzie’s own account, ‘convoluted, vague, and illogical’, so there was no coherent written doctrine of National Socialism to consult. In the cultural field, Riefenstahl would certainly have been aware of the monumental classicising pieces of Hitler’s favourite sculptor, Arno Breker, not least because two sculptures were commissioned for the 1936 Olympics. Similarly, Albert Speer’s classical additions to Werner March’s original, more unabashedly modern, stadium design met with Hitler’s approval.14 Mackenzie views the classical allusions of Riefenstahl’s film as being symptomatic of a German fascination with ancient Greece that goes back to Winckelmann and the eighteenth century. However, Mike O’Mahony, while noting the same phenomenon, comments that the connection between ancient Greek Olympics and the modern National Socialist games ‘is represented as direct, seamless and unmediated by other historical and cultural circumstances. For example, the fact that the German passion for all things Greek dated back to at least the eighteenth century, or that the revival of the Olympic games might owe some debt to the emergence of modern sports in Britain and France, is here carefully edited out, both metaphorically and literally.’15 Moreover, rather than having to come up with an aesthetic equivalent to Nazi ideology in three-anda-half hours, the film was very much a product of the roughly eighteen months of editing, during which Riefenstahl cut down the incredible 1.3 million feet of film that was shot. This process coincided with the infamous Degenerate ‘Art’ exhibition of 1937, with its attack on expressionism, a movement that was also fascinated by Ausdruckstanz. At the opening of that exhibition, Hitler claimed that: ‘Never before was humanity in its external appearance and perceptions closer to the ancient world than it is today.’ He reinforced this by explicitly evoking the athletes of the previous year’s Olympics, contrasting them with the expressionist attempt to portray a less uncritical view of modern society: ‘This type of human, which we saw last year during the Olympic games … exuding proud physical strength – this my good prehistoric art-stutterers – this is the “type” of the new 119

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age. But what do you manufacture? Deformed cripples and cretins, women who inspire only disgust, men who are more like wild beasts, children who, if they were alive, would be regarded as God’s curse!’16 By 1938, it would have been obvious to anybody, let alone a well-connected filmmaker enjoying state patronage, what the Nazi regime saw as desirable in the field of visual culture. Rather than assume an apolitical artistic persona, however, Riefenstahl publicly identified her art with Hitler shortly before the film premiered, hailing him as the ‘most artistic man’ of the new Greater Germany and stating that ‘every artist knows, just as it has become clear to every fellow German: reality yields more than even artistic fantasy can imagine’.17 I accept therefore that Riefenstahl’s aesthetic in 1936–38 was profoundly influenced by her background, training and interests, but I am less convinced by Mackenzie’s view that these cannot be traced directly into National Socialism in the 1930s. As others took a different direction, or severed their links to the regime at an earlier stage, the move from this background to positions aligned with National Socialism is not a necessary one. But the connections are there. Turnen clubs were not quite as divorced from Nazi ideology as they might initially seem. As Guttmann writes, ‘the Nazis were ideologically close to the Deutsche Turnerschaft, whose last leader Edmund Neuendorff, invited Hitler in 1933 to be the guest of honor at a grand Turnfest in Stuttgart. Hitler accepted the invitation and was received by Neuendorff with hysterical declarations of fealty. … The IOC and the organizing committee braced themselves for Hitler’s announcement that he wanted another authentic Turnfest in 1936.’18 Rudolf von Laban, the most prominent promoter of Ausdruckstanz, assumed the artistic direction of the dance events surrounding the Berlin games, the sort of role that he had accepted many times before.19 ‘The Spring Wind and the New Joy’, Laban’s piece to inaugurate the Dietrich Eckart Theatre (the Greek-inspired amphitheatre at the edge of the Olympic Park, named for a National Socialist poet), got as far as the dress-rehearsal stage before being cancelled by Goebbels. A ‘bad, contrived and affected piece’, he wrote in his diary, going on to complain that: ‘It is so intellectual. I do not like it.’20 If this seems to hint at a fundamental incompatibility between Ausdruckstanz and National Socialism, then we should remember not only Laban’s previous commissions, but also that Mary Wigman (Riefenstahl’s dance teacher) did perform at the opening ceremony, which also included Harald Kreutzberg and Gret Palucca (a former darling of the Bauhaus, drawn by Wassily Kandinsky, included in László Moholy-Nagy’s Painting, Film, Photography and praised, like Laban, in an essay by director Hannes Meyer).21 There were also mass gymnastics in the stadium involving ten thousand participants, although neither the dancing nor mass gymnastics feature prominently in the film.22 In truth, although tensions still existed between those promoting Ausdrucktanz, Turnen gymnasts and competitive sportspeople, all three groups had come to some form of accommodation by 1936. For example, the bitter hostility that had existed between the Turnen clubs and proponents of competitive sport at the beginning of the Olympic period had been considerably ameliorated. Soccer teams had been established 120

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by some Turnen clubs and bore the initials TSV, or Turn- und Sport Verein (Turn and Sports Clubs), signifying a rapprochement between the advocates of noncompetitive gymnastics and competitive sport.23 The very fact that mass gymnasts were prepared to take part in the displays that formed part of the Olympic spectacle testified to this new co-existence, and Coubertin actually singled out ‘the magnificent Festival in the monumental Stadium on the first evening of the Games’ as one of the innovations that had been ‘crowned with complete success’.24 The remarkable thing, then, is not that Riefenstahl’s background in mass gymnastics and Ausdruckstanz shapes her view of the human body and its presentation in Olympia but, rather, given that both disciplines were included in the events surrounding the Olympics themselves, how little trace there is of this in the film. But by the time of the release of Olympia both Laban and Wigman had become personae non gratae with the regime. If Riefenstahl had not, it was because she had managed to adapt her Ausdruckstanz training into something less overtly intellectual and more amenable to the regime. One final point: Mackenzie has claimed that the Nazis placed ‘a new emphasis on the previously vague Greek associations of the Olympics’.25 But, as we have seen, Coubertin was always at pains to stress the games’ classical associations, from the use of his father’s picture on the cover of the IOC bulletin, to the staging of the first revived games in Athens. ‘To celebrate the Olympic Games is to appeal to History’, he said during a radio talk from Berlin the year before the games.26 His earlier statement on the ‘moral disorder’ produced by ‘industrial science’ demonstrates not only that he also was antipathetic towards modern society and capitalism, but that he believed that these ill-effects could be resisted precisely by a physical renaissance inspired by the ancient Greeks. At the very least, this might help us to understand the praise that the culturally conservative Coubertin bestowed on the Berlin games and the recognition that the IOC granted Riefenstahl even after the Second World War. These appeals to history and classicism were elements of Olympianism that were subject to critique by both the Workers’ Sport movement and the Soviet Red Sport International in their establishment of rivals to the Olympics, to be discussed below, in the decades before the 1936 games. A constructivist Olympics? Before turning to games staged in opposition to the Olympics, there is an intriguing question: is it possible to imagine an alternative modernist rendering of the 1936 Berlin games? One answer comes in the experience of the constructivist and former Bauhaus master László Moholy-Nagy. By 1936 there was a well-established corpus of constructivist representations of sport, established in part by MoholyNagy himself and developed by Soviet contemporaries such as El Lissitzky, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Nikolai Sidelnikov, Solomon Telingater and Gustav Klucis, whose works will be discussed later in this chapter. Outside the Soviet Union, as well as those works by Lissitzky that were executed in Germany, the Swedish 121

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constructivist GAN (a series of works on boxing, including Bloody Boxing Debut, c. 1926), Werner Rohde (The Footballer, 1927), Marianne Brandt (Sport, 1928; Rohde and Brandt were also at the Bauhaus) and Jiri Tauffer (The Third Intercollegiate Games, Prague, 1932) had all produced photomontages that took sport as their central theme, while competitive sportsmen and women, gymnasts or equipment were included in many more works by other prominent figures, such as Erwin Blumenfeld or Ladislav Sutnar. Moholy-Nagy’s own engagement with sport was deep-rooted. In his book Vision in Motion, he stressed that the ‘intensity and the exhausting effect of industrial work, the crowded, dusty, smoke-polluted cities increased the importance of slum clearance’, which would allow the development of ‘the prefabricated house, recreation and leisure – all connected with a socially oriented design. Sports, cinema, radio, television, travel, the community center, the idea of week-end trips belong to this category.’27 The most ambitious manifestation of Moholy-Nagy’s interest in sport is Kinetic Constructive System, a large-scale utopian building, the initial conception of which he dates to 1922. It is described in From Material to Architecture, later retitled The New Vision, as having been ‘executed by Stefan Sebök in 1928’, although this refers only to the illustrations that accompany the description.28 Sebök was also the architect responsible for the technical drawings of Moholy-Nagy’s famous Light Prop for an Electric Stage (Space-Light Modulator), of 1928–30, with which the Kinetic Constructive System shares many concerns. An obvious constructivist antecedent is Vladimir Tatlin’s seminal Monument for the Third International, which was also designed to rotate, and which shares a spiral construction, a monumental size and an open framework. Indeed, the small, capped figure at the base of Moholy-Nagy/Sebök’s photomontage seems purposefully to recall Tatlin’s own positioning alongside his model in the famous photograph of 1920. Moholy-Nagy’s account stresses its use for ‘general recreation’, but topping the structure is an athletics track.29 Sportspeople appear frequently amongst his photomontages of the 1920s executed at the Bauhaus, and which he described as ‘based on visual and mental gymnastics’.30 In Militarism, 1925–27, hockey players advance with sticks in hand, accompanying a line of colonial armoured cars and a soldier in battle dress, while a footballer, cut to look as if he is throwing a grenade, leads the attack and together the invaders are responsible for the string of dead bodies that arc around the cars and towards the viewer. If this seems to suggest a negative view of sport as aligned with violence, joining the unthinking discipline of both the military and team sports, then a much more ludic view towards sport is evinced by other collages. Sport Makes Appetite, 1927 (figure 31), shows hurdlers racing away from a static matronly figure in a fur-trimmed coat and towards a pair of disembodied legs, perhaps deliberately evoking those female legs in Edouard Manet’s Masked Ball at the Opera or Bar at the Folies Bergère that Linda Nochlin thinks suggest ‘a continuing, even inexhaustible supply of women’s bodies beyond the boundaries of the image’.31 The woman is in one circle, the hurdler and the legs are in another, which emphasises that they are to be seen as linked together and as 122

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31  László Moholy-Nagy, Sport Makes Appetite, 1927

separate from the woman. The hurdler’s bubble is then repeated, superimposed on top of the first, with the addition of three smaller hurdlers all in the act of leaping over an obstacle. Moholy-Nagy added an inscription to the print: ‘Exercise or be fat.’ Joann Skryzpzac has read the work as reflecting the ‘contemporary assumption that physical culture provided the most healthy, positive, and productive means for humans to approach modern life, with a humorous nod at the libidinous appetite that develops as a result.’32 Hurdlers also appear in the earlier Dream of Boarding School Girls, 1924, breaking away from the regimented H-shape of schoolchildren to approach the flexible gymnasts in the foreground. If both groups of hurdlers seemed linked to sexual desire, in flight and soaring towards a (possibly unattainable) object of desire, then the use of a hurdle race in From Material to Architecture is different again (figure 32). A photograph reproduced from a daily newspaper shows five hurdlers about to clear a flight of hurdles, accompanied by the caption: ‘Instead of covering himself up, closing himself in, the man of today lets himself out. Everything strives for light and air, for free expansion.’ In later editions he added a further sentence: ‘A spatial experience built by watching from a distance movements on many planes, perceived as an integral whole.’33 Here, the hurdlers represent a new conception of space and they, together with the play of light that creates the shadows on the ground against the lanes marked out on the cinder track, give rise to a new, and distinctly 123

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32  László Moholy-Nagy, Photographic illustration of hurdlers, From Material to Architecture

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modern, spatial experience. This in itself hints at an alternative conception of the athletic body to the one Riefenstahl generally employs in Olympia; instead of the emphasis being on the body’s capabilities, its musculature or its flexibility, Moholy-Nagy’s bodies are bodies already unfolding in space, to be looked at (as if) through a camera lens, as one element among others. They are objects, always expanding outward, and entering into non-hierarchical relationships with other objects (or light, or shadows) around them. They stand in contrast to Riefenstahl’s bodies, where the surrounding environment is organised to display the body to its fullest advantage, where the body remains, as in classical sculpture, the subject. At the end of the 1920s Moholy-Nagy also turned towards filmmaking. His book Painting, Film, Photography, also published in the Bauhaus series, contains the manuscript for a projected film, Dynamic of the Metropolis, that Moholy-Nagy dated to 1921–22. Sport features heavily: a pole vaulter clears the bar ten times; a soccer match embodies ‘Rough. Vigorous TEMPO’; and a boxing match is illustrated by a typically playful photomontage.34 By the time of the 1936 Olympics, he had completed several short films. With his interest in sport and architecture, as well as his knowledge of Berlin, having lived in the city between his resignation from the Bauhaus in 1928 and his move to London to escape the Nazis in 1934, he was in many ways a natural choice for the English picture agency that approached him to cover the Olympics. Had the project been completed, both the 16mm film and accompanying stills would have provided an alternative modernist rendering of the games, given that Moholy-Nagy’s conceptions differed radically from the pictorialist interests of Riefenstahl. Moholy-Nagy’s emphasis on the body opening out in space contrasts with Riefenstahl’s stress on the body continuing through time, most obviously in her metamorphosis of Discobolus into the contemporary discus thrower. Furthermore, we could say that Riefenstahl’s view of the filmic athletic body is essentially centripetal. Although the discus thrower implies outward movement, generally Riefenstahl’s tableaux are organised with the body as the focal point. Even when the discus, shot or javelin is thrown, it is the body, rather than the projectile, that remains the camera’s object.35 This is not the case, incidentally, when the shot is juggled from hand to hand by the athlete, nor when a ball is thrown from the arms of one person to another, but in the first example the movements of the athlete’s arms are faded into the similar movements of a rhythmic gymnast and in the second the catching hands give way to legs jumping over a skipping rope, so attention is returned to the movements of the body in response to the object. In both cases, the item thrown is out of bodily contact for only a brief moment, is thrown to return, rather than escape. In opposition to that centripetal organisation, the body in Moholy-Nagy is always expanding itself outwards in space, centrifugally. If there remains some doubt about the ideological implications of the commissioning of Riefenstahl’s film, then the same does not appear to be the case for Moholy-Nagy’s task; the agency, in Moholy-Nagy’s words, ‘want me to catch the spectator psychology, the physiognomic contrast between an international crowd and the rabid German nationalists’.36 Riefenstahl’s Olympia, in fact, is at 125

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great pains to show a variety of spectators of different nations all enthusiastically supporting their athletes. Far from opposing one set of supporters with another, Riefenstahl seems to wish to convey an underlying similarity in crowd behaviour that operates irrespective of difference in national dress, perhaps thereby attempting to normalise German nationalism as one amongst many nationalisms. MoholyNagy stressed that his view of the games would present ‘the continuum of the competitions, the constant motion of the games against the aggregate of passive spectators’.37 This is very much in line with the depiction of the hurdlers in The New Vision; bodies are objects in space, to be seen in their relationship to other objects. Riefenstahl, on the other hand, tends to cut from the action to the spectators: first the athletes perform, then we watch the crowd’s reaction to their performance. We can only speculate on what results Moholy-Nagy’s film might have produced. It seems likely that it would more nearly have approached the Soviet work of Rodchenko and Klucis, to be discussed below, and the film-style of Dziga Vertov, whose influence can be discerned in other films made by MoholyNagy. Although he set off for the games in the middle of July, such was the climate of hostility in Berlin that he spent only three days there before leaving Germany for the last time in his life. Even before reaching the stadium in Berlin, things had begun to go wrong. Moholy-Nagy wished to visit a doctor described as ‘a pioneer of medical reform’ and an advocate of ‘vegetarianism, physical culture, and mental discipline’.38 But he found the doctor had been appointed as a professor at a Nazi-dominated university, and although he claimed to be trying to subvert the order from within, Moholy-Nagy knew ‘that he was selling out’.39 Arriving at the stadium for the first day of competition, Moholy-Nagy was greeted by a former Bauhaus student, now a member of the SS. As with the doctor, the soldier claimed that his inner convictions were unchanged and: ‘One day, at the right moment, I’ll show my true face and take up where we left off in Dessau.’40 Finally, Moholy-Nagy visited a former housekeeper with whom he had left his paintings when he emigrated from Germany. The housekeeper informed him that his work had long ago been cut up for kindling. His protests were met by a threat to denounce him for Kulturbolschewismus. On Moholy-Nagy’s account these three incidents all took place on the first two days of his return to Berlin: ‘On the third morning I called London and told them that I wouldn’t take a single shot of the Olympic Games. I’ll never go back to Germany.’41 This is not to say that a constructivist rendering of the 1936 games was impossible. Moholy-Nagy found his extended project impossible to sustain, but Bruno Munari’s Berlin Olympics poster (figure 33) for a publication commemorating the events in Berlin has a number of the hallmarks of constructivist poster design, from the sans-serif typography of the title, to the bold use of a red, white and black colour scheme, and also includes the use of photomontage, in this case broken up by strong vertical lines to suggest a filmic approach (Munari could not have seen Olympia at this time of course, but might well have been aware that the film was in production). As a poster produced in fascist Italy to record 126

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33  Bruno Munari, advertisement for Olimpiadi, 1936. Lithograph (60 × 80 cm). Massimo & Sonia Cirulli Archive, New York

the games hosted by another fascist country it is a reminder, like the Bauhaustrained Xanti Schawinsky’s 1934 Year XII of the Fascist Era poster for Mussolini, that although born of the political left, constructivism could also be put to use under extreme right-wing regimes. Alternatives to the Olympic games As noted above, the Olympic movement met with opposition from leftist groups long before the Berlin games, hostile towards its perceived elitism. The first rival group to the IOC was formed in Ghent in 1913 by a coalition of Belgian, German, British, French and Italian socialists, calling themselves the Physical Culture International.42 The group was re-founded in Lucerne after the First World War, changing its name first to International Association for Sport and Physical Culture, and then again in 1925 to the Socialist Worker Sport International. The defection of a large number of communists, for reasons discussed below, eventually led to the group being referred to as the Lucerne Sports International (LSI). It held its first Olympiad under the slogan ‘NO MORE WAR’ and did so in Frankfurt at a time when German athletes were still excluded from the IOC’s games. In 1931 another games was held in Vienna. The LSI opposed the IOC’s commitment to national competition, placing its own stress on ‘internationalism, worker solidarity 127

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and peace’.43 The LSI games were open to all: 150,000 people watched in Frankfurt, a reported 100,000 people participated in the events and parades in Vienna. This emphasis on participation and egalitarianism contrasted with the strict amateur code of the Olympics, where committees were largely composed of the aristocracy and the haute bourgeoisie. The establishment of the Soviet Union and its emergence from the Russian Civil War had a profound impact on the Lucerne Group, however. The communist Red Sport International (RSI) was founded in explicit opposition to what it saw as the reformist attitude of the socialist LSI. Its mission was ‘the creation and amalgamation of revolutionary proletarian sports and gymnastics organizations in all countries of the world and their transformation into support centers for the proletariat in its class struggle’.44 Initially affiliated to the Comintern, the agency of world revolution, the RSI was officially adopted by it in 1924, at which point, according to its historian André Gounot, the ‘RSI headquarters virtually assumed the role of a Comintern sport committee’.45 Almost immediately it issued an international ‘Manifesto of the Red Sport International’ addressed to ‘the working class Sportsmen of all countries’ and ‘all Working Men and Working Women in Town and Countryside’.46 ‘In the hands of the bourgeoisie’, it argued, ‘gymnastics and sports organizations are converted into tools of bourgeoisie militarism and fascism’ and called for them to be transformed into ‘an important factor – for the proletariat – in the world struggle of the workers and poor peasants for the establishment of a proletarian social order. In the atmosphere of class struggle there can be no “neutrality” and no “non-political attitude” for the workers also in respect to gymnastics and sports.’47 Some of the harshest criticism was directed at the Lucerne Group, which was ‘determined to prevent a truly world Olympiad for the latter would militate against their efforts to collaborate with the bourgeoisie’.48 Its leaders are termed ‘treacherous’ and described as ‘agents provocateurs’ engaged in ‘sabotage’ and ‘deception’. Rejecting their Olympiad, ‘The Red Sport International herewith invites all proletarian gymnastics and sports organizations throughout the world, as well as all other proletarian organizations to take part in the Red World Olympiad – the Red World Spartakaide.’49 The Greek gods of the Olympiad were thereby displaced by Spartacus, the gladiator who led a slave rebellion. Constructivism and sport in the USSR Outside the RSI, sport played an important role domestically in the nascent Soviet Union, where it emerged as a ‘dominant theme within the broader cultural sphere’.50 Fizkultura, a portmanteau term for physical culture, was officially promoted, initially with an eye to towards improving the fitness of military recruits, but also more generally as a way of propounding an active lifestyle for new communist citizens. As Mike O’Mahony notes, in the years after the end of the civil war in 1921, fizkultura placed an increasing emphasis on competitive sports.51 These years were also the crucial ones in the development of radical 128

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Soviet aesthetics in the form of Russian constructivism. The First Working Group of Constructivists came together in the same year, 1921, as the RSI was founded. Its work, and the work of artists closely related to it, would engage with sport for much of the rest of a decade in which both avant-garde activity and sport were being promoted by the new regime. What was produced was varied, ranging from photomontaged posters and photography to new designs for stadiums, sports clothing and written interventions, such as Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poem of 1928 ‘Comrades, Discuss Red Sport!’ That was indeed a significant year to be discussing ‘Red Sport’ as it marked the first iteration of the Spartakiada, for which the constructivist artist Gustav Klucis produced the seminal series of photomontage designs that I will take as my focus. In the ‘Programme of the First Working Group of Constructivists’, Aleksandr Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova called on the group to achieve ‘the real transference of laboratory work on to the rails of practical activity’, meaning an end to their previous experiments in formally radical painting and sculpture and a move into production.52 Attempts to achieve this took a variety of forms, but perhaps the most successful were the textiles that Liubov Popova and Stepanova designed for the First State Cotton-Printing Factory in Moscow in 1923–24. As Christina Kiaer writes, the pair ‘were the only Constructivists to see their designs for everyday utilitarian things actually mass-produced and distributed in the Soviet economy’.53 Although they were never produced for competition, Stepanova published her designs for sports clothing (sportodezhda) in the second issue of the constructivist journal Lef (plate 8). In the accompanying article, ‘Present-Day Dress – Production Clothing’, she stressed that Soviet clothes should be functional. In the field of sport, this was characterised by ‘maximum practicality, simplicity, and ease of wear’, as well as ‘the need to distinguish members of one team from another through the necessary inclusion of precise symbols (emblems, forms, colours of the uniform, etc.)’.54 Three of the four designs are for soccer teams. Stepanova had already made reference to the sport earlier in her essay, writing that: ‘It is obvious that the evolution of clothing is linked to industrial development. Only today, thanks to the progress of industry and technology, is it possible to produce outfits for pilots and drivers, workers’ overalls, football shoes, and military tunics and raincoats.’55 The initially surprising inclusion of soccer equipment alongside specialist equipment for pilots, the proletariat and the army testifies to the importance that was being placed on sport by the Soviet authorities. The incorporation of a pair of legs wearing black socks and boots in the design at the lower left links Stepanova’s project and its related equipment to larger Soviet themes, although since this design has legs but no head or arms, it also introduces an uncanny note. The other soccer designs simply showed the clothes. Stepanova provided descriptions for each: ‘1. a three-color uniform (red, black, and gray) with a red star on the chest [lower right]; 2. a single-color uniform (red), in jersey, with a large badge on the chest [upper right]; 3. a two-color striped uniform (red and white) without badges.’56 The colour combinations used were characteristic of 129

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constructivism more generally.57 The need to distinguish between different teams or individuals had long been acknowledged in the West, of course. But no soccer club there played in a strip with the bold geometrical arrangements that Stepanova envisaged, which resemble rather more closely jockeys’ silks. Nor do they seem to have done in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, the lack of buttons and a collar were a genuine break with kits of the 1920s, and it was not until after the Second World War that this became popular in the West. The remaining outfit is for women basketball players. Stepanova describes the ‘black stripe on the chest and a striped skirt, which make it appear bellshaped’.58 The placement of this design, with its chevrons splaying out towards the edge of the skirt, above the booted red and white design, means that the shorts of the soccer design beneath it seem to echo and complete it. Two red lines there focus attention on the crotch and thighs and pull the design into a compact shape. This is also the case with the chevrons in the design at the lower right, which threaten to develop the bell shape of the basketball player’s skirt until countered by the black lines that run against them and once again establish the crotch as a focal point. Although the Soviet Union would actively promote participation in sport by both sexes, it seems that Stepanova recognised that this did not necessarily entail the obliteration of signifiers of sexual difference.59 Gustav Klucis and the Spartakiada Stepanova’s outfits were not the first instance of a Soviet constructivist engaging with the theme of sport. Gustav Klucis, the pioneer of Soviet photomontage, had produced his Sport in 1922 (figure 34). The work includes the Russian word for sport in Cyrillic sans-serif letters as a backdrop to two photographs of gymnasts. One performs a stand on the parallel bars, meaning that his legs extend almost to the top right of the picture. This is mirrored diagonally by a man in a hooped jersey hauling himself up on the high bar, so that his head approaches the lower left corner of the composition, while eight of his comrades stand beneath him. Running above the letters, but below the photographs, are seven concentric circles that both add dynamism and tie the two photographs together, especially as a set of double lines connects both photographs. O’Mahony has noted ‘that the circular motions of the gymnasts unquestionably allude to the movement of wheels in a machine. … In this way, the leisure aspects of fizkultura are mapped directly onto notions of labour productivity and service to the state.’60 It might have been this piece that suggested to the RSI that Klucis should produce a series of postcards and a poster to commemorate the 1928 Spartakiada games. Klucis used a mixture of found photographs and his own shots to create the photomontages, visiting a photographer, Krasinsky, on more than one occasion to view his archive and adding works from it to photographs he had himself taken of a sports parade in 1924.61 Nine postcards seem finally to have been produced (plate 9), but in letters to his partner, Valentina Kulagina, he writes of as many as sixteen, as well as a poster. Certainly more designs were completed by Klucis; 130

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34  Gustav Klucis, Sport, 1922

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another collage for a postcard, depicting boxing, weightlifting and wrestling, is in a private collection and that for the poster remained in Klucis’ possession, although neither appears to have been printed.62 The most likely explanation for this is that the project was overrunning. The Spartakiada opened on 12 August 1928, but Klucis was still working on the designs as late as 6 August, having missed a 2 August deadline.63 However, as I cannot exclude the possibility that they simply did not meet with the approval of the authorities, and I am interested in the way in which Klucis’ designs represented the Spartakiada to a broad and international public, I will concentrate on those that were definitely produced. Both Kulagina and Klucis were adherents of fizkultura, sufficiently committed not just to train but to have themselves photographed doing so, in Klucis’ case sparring with fellow constructivist Sergei Senkin and holding his arms aloft like a champion, in Kulagina’s case competing in the long jump and being photographed by Klucis in her swimming costume.64 In 1930 she would design the book cover for Physical Culture on the Soviet Path.65 They had, therefore, an interest in Klucis’ subject and, given his earlier Sport photomontage and also a familiarity with Stepanova’s designs, a developed awareness of the role that sport could play in constructivism.66 Unlike Riefenstahl’s Olympia, which at least purported to be a documentary of the 1936 games, it is evident that the Spartakiada postcards are not a record of the event but a projection of it. This is for two reasons. Firstly, there had been no previous Spartakiada and so there was no previous imagery to draw on. Secondly, as official documents of the Soviet Union they obviously sought to portray the Spartakiada in the most favourable light, as the ultimate manifestation of the RSI’s objectives. But these previous Soviet works provided some context for how Klucis could achieve this in a constructivist manner. The Spartakiada was also preceded by Fizkultura Day. Inaugurated in 1923, this parade is described by Robert Edelman as ‘not a sporting event, nor was it a spectator sport. It was a theatrically orchestrated political event that focused on physical culture first and competitive sport only secondarily.’67 Nevertheless, it is possible that the parade that Klucis photographed in 1924 was the second of these. Some aspects of the Spartakiada were in keeping with this recent tradition. It had military events, dances and parades and a ‘stroll’ of thirty thousand people through the Lenin Hills, something that Edelman identifies as replicating ‘one of the most typical and long-standing peasant practices’.68 In its inclusivity it also followed the games that had been organised by the LSI. Nevertheless, as Edelman notes, the ‘core of the program, however, was the same as that of the Olympics’.69 It is these sports on which Klucis concentrates, with more minor roles assigned to the parades and associated activities. They are noticeable for the prominent role they accord to women, who feature as the dominant figures on the cards promoting tennis, running and discus throwing and are also depicted shooting rifles, diving, jumping and possibly also throwing a javelin, although the gender of the lower figure is difficult to ascertain. The Soviet Union was unusual in developing a policy of actively promoting sport as an activity for women. Sport was ‘one of the most effective forms of achieving the uniformity – and not 132

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merely the equality or equal rights – of women and men’.70 The 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam, which closed on the day the Spartakiada opened, had been the first to permit women to compete in athletics events. This had been a grudging acceptance, one carried out against de Coubertin’s wishes, brought about by the success of the Women’s Olympic games, first held in 1922, and it resulted in women being allowed to participate in just five track and field events.71 The Soviet promotion of sport for women was much more thoroughgoing but met with mixed results. Kateryna Kobchenko states that in 1928 there were 90,000 women in the fizkultura and sports movement in the Ukraine, compared to 205,000 male athletes. Although not an equal number, a figure approaching a third does seem to indicate some sort of success, although Kobchenko’s work uncovers some significant obstacles in encouraging older women to become involved and in the provision of equipment, and that attempts to improve the situation remained ‘only declarations of intent’.72 She also gives a participation rate for women in sports festivals that is below 20 per cent before the end of the 1920s, but this is still comfortably in excess of a participation rate below 10 per cent for the 1928 Olympics.73 The Klucis photomontages consistently seek to promote similar Soviet ideologies. They are brightly coloured, with each featuring the words Spartakiada, Moscow, the acronym RSI and the year, along with Klucis’ own name, but with no uniformity of placement, font or orientation. Words are frequently placed on diagonals, or run down the page. In the case of the postcard of the discus thrower (plate 10), the words themselves are organised in a series of horizontals, with RSI at the top left and then ‘Spartakiada’, the hand-coloured ‘1928’ and ‘Moscow’ appearing in descending order and aligned against a strong red vertical, on the other side of which is Klucis’ name, which reads vertically up. Pieces of red, yellow and blue paper form a background with the neutral ground of the backing paper. Dominating the top half of the picture is a woman athlete, her badge signifying that she is a member of Mensantrud, the Union of Medical Workers, poised to throw the discus but looking at the camera.74 Klucis’ discus thrower is, then, neither the classical Discobolus nor the classically inspired nude male of Riefenstahl’s Olympia, but instead a working woman, representing her profession. Most of the Soviet Union’s sporting clubs were affiliated to particular industries or government departments, following the establishment of the first Voluntary Sports Club, Dynamo, by the Ministry of the Interior in 1923.75 This was the club to which Rodchenko belonged, and his setting for a series of photographs taken in 1932, and careful examination of Klucis’ tennis postcard, reveals the ‘D’ of the Dynamo club on the shirt pocket of the male player to the right. Below the discus thrower, a group of athletes from Komsomol (the Communist Union of Youth) parade from right to left through Moscow. Cutting across this group is another group, which moves from left to right. Dressed in black, these athletes are from the Neukölln area of Berlin, judging by the wording on the flag. This group is given added dynamism by the yellow and black diagonally placed strips, which pass behind the red vertical. All this takes place, remarkably, under the watchful 133

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gaze of Lenin, who had died four years previously, and who is positioned standing on the roof of his recently completed mausoleum. The photographic elements thus proclaim the equality of the sexes, youth, internationalism and the presiding authority of the communist party in the Soviet Union. But this is allied to the vivacity and dynamism of the brightly coloured complex geometrical arrangements which Klucis employs. In other respects, the actuality of the Spartakiada did not live up to Klucis’ projections. Under 30 per cent of athletes were proletarians, a lower percentage than for white-collar workers. Several days of athletics were postponed for lack of equipment and ticketing arrangements were ‘marked by confusion’.76 The crowds for soccer were large, but they dwarfed those for other sports, such as athletics and swimming, which were being far more vigorously promoted by the authorities. Internationalism was also only a qualified success. Part of the reason for soccer’s popularity was a rare chance to see teams from the USSR in competition with Western sides, although since these latter were amateur they were no match for their hosts. Gounot reports that the twenty-eight French athletes who attended ‘seem to have misunderstood the real purpose of their “mission” and were intent on turning their visit – designed to further their political education – into a holiday trip for their own amusement’.77 Rodchenko and the Dynamo stadium Klucis’ work for the Spartakiada did not mark the end of Soviet photomontage treating sporting themes: Solomon Telingater’s Ten Posters of Exercise and Sports date from the same or the following year. In 1930 sometime Klucis collaborator Nikolai Sidelnikov produced The Time, the Energy, the Will and the cover for Bicycle Sport, both of which, like Telingater’s designs, are strongly influenced by the Spartakiada work. Away from photomontage, Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) contains an extended sequence of athletics, which seems to have influenced Riefenstahl’s treatment of some of the more inventive sequences of Olympia. Rodchenko frequently took sport as a theme, concentrating in 1932 on the recently opened Dynamo sports club in a series of works for an unrealised project, The New Moscow, shooting works such as Dynamo Stadium. Sports Parade (figure 35). Although Rodchenko also focused on competitive sport, amongst the best-known photographs of this series are those of parading columns of Dynamo athletes, partly as a result of the inclusion of Column of ‘Dynamo’ Sport Society. Members moving towards Red Square in the exhibition ‘Masters of Soviet Photo Art’ in 1935 and partly because Dynamo Stadium. Sports parade did appear in another project, From Merchant to Socialist Moscow.78 As mentioned above, Dynamo was the club of the Ministry of the Interior, and Rodchenko was certainly a member by 1934. Dynamo Stadium. Sports parade shows columns of athletes parading around the athletics track and concrete cycle track of the stadium. Designed by Arkady Langman in a style that has been described as ‘moderately constructivist’, the stadium had been inaugurated for the Moscow Spartakiada, where it had served 134

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35  Aleksandr Rodchenko, Dynamo Stadium. Sports Parade, 1932

as the largest venue.79 As such, its modernity and design would have appealed to Rodchenko. Dynamo Stadium. Grandstand (figure 36) and Dynamo Stadium. Sports parade would have appeared together in The New Moscow. The two works seem to complete one another, with the arcs of the tracks almost joining to present a view of three-quarters of the playing surface, the view of Dynamo Stadium. Sports Parade extending to just past the halfway line of the soccer pitch at its centre. But, as this reveals, the two works are also at odds with one another. While Dynamo Stadium. Grandstand is in portrait format, giving a view of the length of the stadium, Dynamo Stadium. Sports Parade is in landscape format, giving greater emphasis to the curve of the cycle track, which almost touches the upper left corner before sweeping down to the centre right edge of the composition and exiting the frame of the work with the athletes at the lower left. Moreover these athletes march clockwise, while their counterparts on the athletics track move counter-clockwise, establishing a fluid dynamism in the work. The crowd here is just visible, although cropped. In Dynamo Stadium. Grandstand, by contrast, the pitches and tracks take up proportionally less space and one can see trees and buildings outside the confines of the stadium. There are no athletes parading, simply a distant row of figures at the far end of the running track. The emphasis therefore is placed more on the relatively thin crowd seated 135

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36  Aleksandr Rodchenko, Dynamo Stadium. Grandstand, 1932

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on the tiers of the stand waiting for action. About the only sign of dynamism comes in the flags flying from the roof of the modest structure that gives the photograph its title. It is perhaps surprising that there are so few works that treat the sporting crowd directly. They are there in Metzinger’s At the Cycle-Race Track and Gleizes’s The Football Players, but are hardly the focus of the work. They are indexed in Delaunay’s The Cardiff Team through its use of advertising, but they are not depicted. Aside from this work by Rodchenko, only a couple of minor works by Josef Albers and Wyndham Lewis seem to adopt the crowd as a central theme. The one major work that depicts a spectator, Pablo Picasso’s The Aficionado, holds him up as a figure of fun; a lone man in an outsize hat off to watch some substandard bullfighting at Nimes.80 There seems to exist no visual European equivalent to William Carlos Williams’s ode to sports fans, ‘The Crowd at the Ball Game’. This is worth remarking because the crowd was important in other areas for modernists. Luigi Russolo’s The Crowd or Carlo Carrà’s The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli, for example, testify to its importance to Italian futurism. Gustav Le Bon’s The Psychology of Crowds was widely read. It might be that the sporting crowd was considered too docile, having paid money to attend and with its action directed towards a spectacle staged for its benefit. But this alone cannot provide an explanation, as theatre crowds also meet this description and have provided rich material for works by Manet, Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Walter Sickert, amongst others. Sporting crowds might have been seen by Norbert Elias as an instance of The Civilizing Process, but, as in the case of ‘l’affaire Baxter’ when the French rugby crowd rioted following defeat to the Scots in 1913, they could be febrile enough. A further possibility is that, consciously or unconsciously, the omission of depictions of the sporting crowd reflects contemporary attitudes and debates. I have already mentioned the distaste that the Turnen gymnasts felt for competition, and I will touch on a similar debate in France in my conclusion, but the situation in the USSR was especially polarised. Here the hygienists group saw fizkultura as being solely about training the body; playing competitive sport risked injury, and spectators were an irrelevance. Proletkult, the Proletarian Culture movement, favoured a complete overhaul of the sporting system, with ‘bourgeois’ sports replaced by grand spectacles involving thousands of participants. As O’Mahony puts it: ‘Despite their differences, both the Hygienists and Proletkult shared the view that active participation needed to replace passive viewing. Furthermore, both groups were so fervent in their condemnation of competitive sports that they advocated banning them altogether.’81 Edelman agrees: ‘Soviet sports critics felt that passive watching of spectacles produced by a small number of professionals was degenerate and dehumanizing to athlete and audience alike.’82 The dispute was settled by a resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party dated 13 July 1925 that found, in Edelman’s words, ‘in favour of a high-performance, competitive approach that could inspire proper values and instil a respect for authority’.83 137

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There was one tangible visual record of the rise of spectator sports on the city, however, and, as Rodchenko’s photographs of the sports parades at Dynamo reveal, it had not escaped the attention of modernists. For if the sports crowd had largely been neglected, then the buildings that contained them had certainly not. Langman’s work for Dynamo was just one of many modernist stadiums which were projected or built during the 1920s and 1930s and this forms the subject of the next chapter. Notes 1 Boris Groys, ‘Aleksandr Deineka: The Eternal Return of the Athletic Body’, in Aleksandr Deineka (1866–1969): An Avant-Garde for the Proletariat, ed. María Zozaya (Madrid: Fundación Juan March, 2011), 78. 2 John J. MacAloon, This Great Symbol: Pierre de Coubertin and the Origins of the Modern Olympic Games (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 80. 3 Pierre de Coubertin, ‘Athletics in the Modern World and the Olympic Games: Analysis and Extracts from a lecture given to the Parnassus Club at Athens by Baron de Coubertin’, 1894, published in the Bulletin du Comité International des Jeux Olympiques, January 1895 and included in de Coubertin, The Olympic Idea: Discourses and Essays, trans. John D. Dixon (Schorndorf: Carl Diem Institut, 1967), 8. MacAloon, This Great Symbol, 188, calls this passage ‘the earliest concerted statement on Coubertin’s part of what was to become a consistent theme in his own and Olympic ideology, that sport is an antidote to the evils of industrial civilization’. 4 Allen Guttmann, The Olympics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 2. 5 Pierre de Coubertin, ‘Speech by Baron de Coubertin at the Close of the Berlin Olympic Games’, 1936, in The Olympic Idea, 136. 6 Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproduction’, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992), 235. 7 Susan Sontag, ‘Fascinating Fascism’, New Yorker, 6 February 1975. Online at http:// www.nybooks.com/articles/1975/02/06/fascinating-fascism/ (accessed 10 October 2016). 8 Sontag, ‘Fascinating Fascism’. 9 Sontag, ‘Fascinating Fascism’. 10 Guttmann, The Olympics, 70–1. 11 Michael Mackenzie, ‘Athens to Berlin: the 1936 Olympics and Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia’, Critical Inquiry 29, no. 2 (Winter 2003), 319. Mackenzie’s essay is a masterclass on addressing the existing literature on Olympia and shedding new light on the debates involved. I am greatly indebted to it here. 12 Mackenzie, ‘Athens to Berlin’, 315–16. See Guttmann, The Olympics, 8, for Coubertin’s attitude towards the clubs. 13 Mackenzie, ‘Athens to Berlin’, 313–14. 14 Camiel van Winkel, ‘Dance, Discipline, Density and Death: The Crowd in the Stadium’, in The Stadium: The Architecture of Mass Sport, ed. Michelle Provoost (Rotterdam: NAI, 2000), 25. 15 Mike O’Mahony, Olympic Visions: Images of the Games Through History (London: Reaktion, 2012), 72. 138

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16 Adolf Hitler, ‘Hitler’s Speech Dedicating the House of German Art’, translated by Dieter Kuntz in Inside Hitler’s Germany: A Documentary History of Life in the Third Reich, eds Benjamin Sax and Dieter Kuntz (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1992), 230 (ellipses in this source). 17 ‘Leni Riefenstahl, 9 April 1938’, quoted in Cooper C. Graham, Leni Riefenstahl and Olympia (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2001), 181. 18 Guttmann, The Olympics, 54. 19 Von Laban was appointed Director of the Deutsche Tanzbühne (German Dance Theatre) in September 1934. 20 Goebbels, quoted in Valerie Preston-Dunlop, Rudolf Laban: An Extraordinary Life (London: Dance Books, 1998), 196. 21 Mary Anne Santos Newhall, Mary Wigman: A Life in Dance (London: Routledge, 2007), 53, gives an account of the dances performed as part of the opening ceremony. I will discuss Meyer’s essay in the following chapter. 22 Richard D. Mandell, The Nazi Olympics (London: Souvenir Press, 1972), 154, gives the number of participants and notes that their movements ‘owed a great deal to the German experience with festivals of the Turnerschaften’. Graham, Leni Riefenstahl and Olympia, 185, believes that scenes of mass gymnastics displays may have been cut at the last minute from Olympia, but can shed no light on why. 23 Examples include TSV 1860 München and TSV 1860 Rosenheim. The former had a competitive soccer team by 1902, the latter by 1919. The 1860 dates refer to the establishment of the Turnen clubs. In 1924, the Turnen authorities ordered a separation between all such sporting and gymnastic activity, but the clubs were reconciled by 1933. See Ulrich Hesse-Lichtenberger, Tor! The Story of German Football, new ed. (London: WSC, 2003), 15–32. 24 Coubertin, ‘Speech at the Close of the Berlin Olympic Games’, 136. 25 Mackenzie, ‘Athens to Berlin’, 317. 26 Pierre de Coubertin, ‘The Philosophic Foundation of Modern Olympism: Message Broadcast from Berlin, 4 August 1935’, in The Olympic Idea, 130. 27 László Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1961), 55. 28 László Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision: From Material to Architecture, trans. Daphne M. Hoffmann (New York: Brewer, Warren and Putnam, 1932), 165. Moholy-Nagy constantly altered his text, mainly augmenting it, during his lifetime. Although much of the material I discuss is little changed between editions, I will generally cite from the first English translation and give its full title to distinguish it from later editions, in which the credit to Sebök is omitted. 29 Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision: From Material to Architecture, 164. 30 László Moholy-Nagy, ‘Photo-sculpture (photomontage)’, translated in Andreas Haus, Moholy-Nagy: Photographs and Photograms, trans. Frederic Samson (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980), 49. 31 Linda Nochlin, The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), 89. 32 Joann Skrypzak, ‘Sporting Modernity: Artists and the Athletic Body in Germany, 1918–1934’, in In Sickness and in Health: Disease as Metaphor in Art and Popular Wisdom, ed. Laurinda S. Dixon and Gabriel Weisberg (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 187. 33 László Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision: Fundamentals of Bauhaus Design, Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2005), 170. 139

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34 László Moholy-Nagy, Painting, Film, Photography, trans. Janet Seligman (London: Lund Humphries, 1969), 130–2. 35 This remains broadly the case in the shots of the Games themselves. For example, the men’s javelin sequence begins with three javelins thrown by unseen hands being tracked in flight (thereby establishing the technical capacity to film them), but of the sixteen throws then shown, only five track the flight of the javelin, while for the remaining eleven the camera remains fixed on the athletes and the javelin is not seen again even on landing. In the women’s javelin, three throws are shown, with only the winning throw tracking the javelin in flight. 36 Moholy-Nagy quoted in Sybil Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy: Experiment in Totality, 2 ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), 131. 37 Moholy-Nagy, quoted in Sybil Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy, 131. 38 Sybil Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy, 132. 39 Sybil Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy, 132. 40 Sybil Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy, 132. 41 Moholy-Nagy, quoted in Sybil Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy, 133. 42 See James Riordan, ‘The Worker Sports Movement’, in The International Politics of Sport in the 20th Century, eds James Riordan and Arnd Krüger (London: Spon Press, 1995), 107. I have followed Riordan’s essay in setting out the main events organised in competition with the Olympic games and the principal points of contention with the IOC. 43 Riordan, ‘The Worker Sports Movement’, 109. 44 André Gounot, ‘Sport or Political Organization? Structures and Characteristics of the Red Sport International, 1921–1937’, Journal of Sport History 28, no. 1 (Spring 2001), 23, quoting from the RSI’s statutes. 45 Gounot, ‘Sport or Political Organization?’, 27. 46 ‘Manifesto of the Red Sport International’, November 1924. The English translation appeared in the Young Worker, 9 May 1925, 4. 47 ‘Manifesto of the Red Sport International’, 4. 48 ‘Manifesto of the Red Sport International’, 4. 49 ‘Manifesto of the Red Sport International’, 4. The games are normally translated as ‘Spartakiada’, which I have followed below. 50 Mike O’Mahony, Sport in the USSR: Physical Culture – Visual Culture (London: Reaktion, 2006), 8. 51 O’Mahony, Sport in the USSR, 16–17. The array of practices that fizkultura could also encompass includes gymnastics, military exercises, hygiene, sunbathing, swimming and more. 52 Aleksandr Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova, ‘Programme of the First Working Group of Constructivists’, trans. Christina Lodder in Art in Theory 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, eds Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 341. 53 Christina Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 89. 54 Varst [Vavara Stepanova], ‘Present-Day Dress – Production Clothing’, Lef 2, translated in Against Fashion: Clothing as Art, 1850–1930, ed. Radu Stern (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 173. 55 Stepanova, ‘Present-Day Dress’, 172. 56 Stepanova, ‘Present-Day Dress’, 173. 140

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57 Compare for example Klucis’ Design for a screen–tribune–kiosk (1922) or Rodchenko’s Designs for logos for the Soviet Aeroplane Agency, Dobrolet. The latter appeared in the same issue of Lef as Stepanova’s work. 58 Stepanova, ‘Present-Day Dress’, 173. 59 Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions, 114–17, develops a reading of Stepanova’s androgynous (non-sporting) clothes for the Academy of Communist Education, as ‘minimizing natural differences between bodies’ (117). This does not seem to be the case for the sports clothing, where Stepanova is at pains to specify the gender of the basketball kit and accompanies this by designing a skirt rather than a pair of shorts. 60 O’Mahony, Sport in the USSR, 24. 61 Margarita Tupitsyn, Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina: Photography and Montage After Constructivism (New York/Göttingen: International Center of Photography/Steidl, 2004), 179, reproduces in translation Klucis’ letter to Kulagina, including ‘This is the second time I’m going to see Krasinsky, the photographer, at home, still about photographs’. In her The Soviet Photograph, 1924–1937 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 49, Tupitsyn also refers to Klucis’ own photographs of the earlier sports parade. 62 The postcard design is illustrated in (ed.) Lutz Becker, Cut and Paste: European Photomontage 1920–1945 (Rome/London: Gangemi/Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, 2008), 109, cat. 53. The poster design is illustrated in Larisa Oginskaya, Gustav Klutsis (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1981), 86. 63 See letters of 31 July and 6 August in Tupitsyn, Klutsis and Kulagina, 184. 64 See Tupitsyn, Klutsis and Kulagina, 107, plates 51 and 52, and 169, fig. 97. 65 See Tupitsyn, Klutsis and Kulagina, 107, plate 50. 66 Klucis is sometimes credited as the author of the unsigned article ‘Photomontage’, in LEF, 4. For Tupitsyn’s reasons for considering this not to be the case, but also for confirmation that Klucis read the journal, see Tupitsyn, Klutsis and Kulagina, 19–20. 67 Robert Edelman, Serious Fun: A History of Spectator Sports in the USSR (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 41. Much of the following is indebted to Edelman’s account. 68 Edelman, Serious Fun, 38. 69 Edelman, Serious Fun, 38. 70 Kateryna Kobchenko, ‘Emancipation within the Ruling Ideology: Soviet Women in Fizkul’tura and Sport in the 1920s and 1930s’, in Euphoria and Exhaustion: Modern Sport in Soviet Culture and Society, eds Nikolaus Katzer et al. (Frankfurt: Campus, 2010), 254. 71 O’Mahony, Olympic Visions, 55–7. 72 Kobchenko, ‘Emancipation’, 256. 73 Kobchenko, ‘Emancipation’, 261. Guttmann, The Olympics, Appendix, 173, gives 290 women competitors out of 2,971 athletes at the 1928 Olympics. 74 I am grateful to Anastasia Belyaeva and Svetlana Burkardt for their help in identifying this. 75 Edelman, Serious Fun, 33. 76 Edelman, Serious Fun, 40. Unless otherwise stated I take this litany of the Spartakiada’s shortcomings from Serious Fun, 38–40. 77 Gounot, ‘Sport or Political Organization?’, 31. 78 For Masters of Soviet Art, see the installation photograph in Aleksandr Rodchenko, Experiments for the Future: Diaries, Essays, Letters, and Other Writings, ed. Alexander N. 141

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79 80 81 82 83

Lavrentiev, trans. Jamey Gambrell (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2005), 300, where Column of Dynamo Sport Society is at the bottom left. For From Merchant to Socialist Moscow, see the page reproduced in Margarita Tupitsyn, Aleksandr Rodchenko: The New Moscow (Munich: Schirmer, 1998), 15. Alexandra Köhring, ‘Exploring the Power of the Curve: Projects for an International Red Stadium in 1920s Moscow’, in Euphoria and Exhaustion: Modern Sport in Soviet Culture and Society, eds Nikolaus Katzer et al. (Frankfurt: Campus, 2010), 55. See Thomas Crow, Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 27–8. O’Mahony, Sport in the USSR, 61. Edelman, Serious Fun, 6. Edelman, Serious Fun, 34.

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5 The stadium has carried the day against the art museum

In 1926, one year before he took up his post of Master of Architecture at the Bauhaus and two years before he succeeded Walter Gropius as its director, Hannes Meyer wrote an essay, ‘The New World’, for the Swiss Werkbund magazine Das Werk.1 In it, Meyer aligns sport with a series of modern developments that constitute the ‘New World’ of his title. Motor cars and aeroplanes abolish distance as well as the separation between town and country and between nations. Swimming pools introduce hygiene. Tractors and cultivators revolutionise agriculture. Developments in radio and sound technologies make us part of a ‘world community’. National costumes are discarded in favour of fashion and ‘the external masculinization of women’, which shows that ‘inwardly the two sexes have equal rights’. Psychoanalysis has ‘burst open the all too narrow dwelling of the soul’. Steam engines are replaced by electric locomotives. Paper sizes are standardised, as is mass entertainment, uniting people into ‘a community with a common fate’. Within this account, the dance of Gret Palucca, the ‘movement choirs’ of Rudolf von Laban and ‘D. Mensendieck’s functional gymnastics’ (actually the functional gymnastics of the European-based American Bess M. Mensendieck) are aligned against ‘the eroticism of the nude in painting’, giving a foretaste of the opposition between sporting exertion and artistic contemplation.2 Immediately following this, Meyer devotes a passage to sport: The stadium has carried the day against the art museum, and physical reality has taken the place of beautiful illusion. Sport merges the individual into the mass. Sport is becoming the university of collective feeling. Suzanne Lenglen’s cancellation of a match disappoints hundreds of thousands, Breitensträter’s defeat sends a shiver through hundreds of thousands. Hundreds of thousands follow Nurmi’s race over 10,000 metres on the running track.3

In contrast to the three named innovators in the fields of dance and gymnastics, who were little known outside these areas, the three sportspeople that Meyer chose were household names at the time: Suzanne Lenglen, the first superstar 143

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of women’s tennis, was in the news for withdrawing from the 1926 Wimbledon championships the month before Meyer’s essay. As discussed in chapter two, she was a celebrity who took to the court in dresses designed by Jean Patou and was the model for the female tennis player in Jean Cocteau’s Le Train Bleu. The boxer Hans Breitensträter was portrayed in a lithograph by the German expressionist Rudolf Grossmann which was distributed alongside his autobiography. The German champion, he fought and lost in Paris to Francis Charles in May 1926. Paavo Nurmi, nicknamed ‘The Flying Finn’, won gold in the 10,000 metres at the Olympics in Antwerp in 1920. At the Paris games of 1924 Nurmi became the first athlete to win five gold medals at a single Olympics. However, following a win in the gruelling cross-country race, Finnish officials refused to allow him to defend his 10,000 metre title, which was won by a rival Finn, Ville Ritola, who broke the world record in the process. As a response, on his return to Finland Nurmi staged a successful attempt to reclaim his world record. Sport thereby operates in two distinct, albeit related, ways in Meyer’s account: it creates figures such as Breitensträter, Lenglen and Nurmi, whose exploits unite many people internationally, as part of a world community. In this sense it ‘merges the individual into the mass’ and promotes ‘collective feeling’ in the same way that the film stars Meyer goes on to name (Harold Lloyd, Douglas Fairbanks, Jackie Coogan) draw people together ‘irrespective of class and racial differences’ into a single collective body. But sport is also distinctively modern and has a new building type, the stadium, which ‘has carried the day against the art museum’. Just as innovations in dance and gymnastics displaced the tired erotic nude in art, the stadium could displace the art museum. On this reading, the stadium is the locus for trained bodies that compete against one another, and which is aligned to the other technological achievements that Meyer describes. Sport emphasises what Meyer believes is the ‘keener sense of speed’ that modern people possess and the speed records set in the stadium ‘are a direct gain for all’.4 Sport’s concentration on records and timekeeping echoes the ‘precise division into hours of the time we spend working in office and factory and the split-minute timing of railway timetables [that] make us live more consciously’.5 As such, sport and the stadium are opposed to art and the art museum. Meyer tells us that ‘municipal theatres and the art museums are deserted’. What is needed is a creative work based on constructivist principles, which does not look to the outmoded past, of which representative art is an example: This new creative work can only be done on the basis of our time and with the means of our time. Yesterday is dead; Bohemia is dead. Dead are atmosphere, colour values, burr, mellow tones and random brush-strokes. Dead the novel: we have neither the suspension of belief nor the time to read. Dead picture and sculpture as images of the real world: in the age of films and photos they are a dissipation of effort and the endless ‘beautification’ of our real world through the interpretations of ‘artists’ is presumptuous. Dead is the work of art as a ‘thing 144

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in itself’, as ‘art for art’s sake’: our communal consciousness will not tolerate any individualistic excesses.6

Meyer’s interest in sport was hardly exhausted by its inclusion in ‘The New World’. In his letter to Gropius accepting his post at the Bauhaus, Meyer wrote that: ‘The basic tendency of my teaching will absolutely be functionalist, collectivist, and Constructivist in the sense of ABC and “The New World”.’7 After he arrived there, he set about increasing the role of sport. The best-known photograph of him (figure 37) shows him dressed in what appears to be a track top, very different to the three-piece suit and bow tie worn by Gropius, or the cigar-smoking urbanity of his successor as director, Mies van der Rohe. According to Swantje Scharenberg, Meyer ‘regarded “a university without physical exercise” as an “absurdity” and

37  Umbo (Otto Umbehr), Portrait of Hans Meyer at the Drawing Board, c. 1925 145

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used the introduction of sport to combat “the proverbial collective neuroses of the Bauhaus, the result of a one-sided emphasis on brainwork” ’.8 In an organogram of activity at the Bauhaus produced in 1930 (figure 38) he placed sport alongside theatre and the Bauhaus musical band, the Bauhaus-Kapelle (which played at the famous parties), as combining to set the climate for the courses and workshops that followed. Yet even here sport is marked out. The two small circles within the sport circle indicate the presence of two instructors appointed by Meyer: Otto Büttner, who taught men’s sport and gymnastics, and Carla Grosch, a former pupil of Gret Palucca, who taught physical education to the female students.9 Not only was sport integrated into the curriculum by Meyer, but it was aligned

38  Hannes Meyer, Detail of an organogram of the Bauhaus, 1930 146

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with the general ideology of the Bauhaus during its time in Dessau. Two photographs in particular emphasize this: T. Lux Feininger’s Sport at the Bauhaus, 1927 (figure 39) and Hajo Rose’s High-Jumper in front of Prellerhaus, 1930 (figure 40). Both depict sporting activity against the backdrop of Gropius’s modernist architecture for the Dessau campus. Indeed, Rose’s picture actually shows Büttner at work, demonstrating to students the correct high-jump technique in front of the

39  T. Lux Feininger, Sport at the Bauhaus, 1927 147

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40  Hajo Rose, High Jumper in front of the Prellerhaus, 1930

studio-flats at the Bauhaus. In the former, Feininger, son of the painter of The Bicycle Race, adopts a low camera angle to emphasise the leap of the two footballing students, with a side view of the Prellerhaus framed by their legs. Running between the Prellerhaus and the main teaching and workshop block is a long, low structure that housed the canteen and the gymnasium, the roof of which was frequently used by exercising students. Rosalind Krauss has written of the two footballers that: ‘The traces they are kicking over in the athleticism and freedom of their movement are those repressive strictures of an outworn culture: 148

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lugubrious clothes, mincing gaits, cluttered interiors, conventionalized gesture.’10 This outworn culture is also the focus of Meyer’s attack in ‘The New World’. The Bauhaus’s sporting connections were not initiated by Meyer’s arrival. Wassily Kandinsky had already become fascinated with Palucca’s dances, drawing her as a series of straight lines and arcs during 1925. Johannes Itten, the original leader of the Basic Course and long-since departed by the time of Meyer’s appointment, was a former artistic gymnast who also played soccer and athletics. The sporting interests of László Moholy-Nagy, who assumed responsibility for the Basic Course in 1923, were discussed in the previous chapter and led him to include pictures of hurdlers and a motor race at the Nürburgring in his book From Material to Architecture. Gropius had actually stressed the importance of gymnastics in 1920, the year after the foundation of the school. In a letter to Adolf Behne he wrote: ‘Today it is impossible to reform just one particular object, we have to take a good look at the entirety of life itself: housing, the education of children, gymnastics and much more.’11 Meyer’s concerns with sport were more overt, less spiritual, than many of these others, according it a dedicated role in the timetable and placing it alongside the theatre and Bauhaus band, but distinguishing it from them by providing teachers for sport (Oskar Schlemmer, the theatre workshop master, having left in 1929). The modernist stadium The development of the modernist multi-sports stadium was uneven. When the Olympic games were revived in 1896 they were held in the Pan-Athenaic stadium, a reconstructed ancient hippodrome built entirely of marble. However, this had tight corners to its track, which meant both that the runners had to slow down to negotiate turns and that the area for field sports enclosed by the track was too restricted. In the next games, held in Paris in 1900 there was no stadium at all, with track and field events being held on grass in the Bois de Boulogne.12 Although a raft of soccer stadiums, velodromes and swimming pools had been constructed between 1896 and the time that Meyer wrote his essay, very few had paid any attention to anything other than the logistics of getting large numbers of people into an arena to watch an event. Stadiums would either continue to acknowledge their classical roots, or they would be engineered to satisfy purely utilitarian concerns. With disasters such as that at Ibrox stadium in Glasgow in 1902, where a stand collapsed killing twenty-five people, even supposedly utilitarian engineering solutions were still very much under development. In Britain, the engineer Archibald Leitch was responsible for designing many soccer grounds, resulting in the majority of British pitches having four independent stands (and perhaps also a pavilion) arranged close to the sides of the pitch.13 But during the 1920s and 1930s the stadium emerged as a distinctive building type in continental Europe, with a pitch usually surrounded by an athletics track, frequently also by a cycle track, and sometimes also having swimming facilities, to form a multi-sports complex that was often integrated into wider urban planning schemes. As these 149

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decades progressed, stadiums became symbolic of ideologies as different as Soviet communism, Italian and German fascism and the French Popular Front. Planning them attracted many of the prominent modernist architects of the day: Le Corbusier, Alvo Aalto, Tony Garnier, Pier Luigi Nervi, Jan Wils, Mart Stam, Brinkman and van der Vlugt, El Lissitzky and Nikolai Ladovsky, amongst others. It is a testament to the rise of the stadium and the perceived need to include sporting facilities for an urban population that by 1931 the Czech artist and architectural theorist Karel Teige could criticise plans that did not include such facilities, placing them on the same level as schools, social clubs and cultural centres. Writing of the VČELA competition in Prague, 1931, Teige lamented that: In order to stay within the floor area limitations of the competition program, and wishing to provide these small apartments with as much usable overall space as possible, the designers frequently failed to respect the real needs of collective dwelling by neglecting collective functions, such as adequate accommodations for children’s homes, collective facilities for education, communal halls for social life, spaces for organized and cultural and political activities, and playgrounds and sports facilities – in short, the functions without which a proletarian dwelling cannot exist.14

The first example of a stadium integrated into a modernist urban planning scheme was in Tony Garnier’s Cité Industrielle project, which dates back to 1904. Garnier’s plan was for an unnamed city of thirty-five thousand, which was divided into four sections: housing, work, health and leisure. From 1906, Garnier was given the opportunity to execute some of the ideas and buildings of the Cité Industrielle project in his home town of Lyon. The stadium, Stade Gerland, until 2015 home to the city’s soccer team Olympique Lyonnais, was built between 1914 and 1926 and originally included a soccer or rugby pitch, circled by an athletics track, with a cycle track beyond that, as well as space for thirty-five thousand spectators. Significantly, it was included in one of the key histories attempting to establish the modern movement, Sigfried Giedion’s Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferro-Concrete.15 The stadium was entered by one of four monumental arches, causing Giedion to pronounce that Garnier was ‘undoubtedly impeded by classicism’.16 But the inclusion of two photographs of the building testified to Giedion’s recognition of its importance (figure 41). So, too, did Giedion’s decision to include a recent ferro-concrete cantilevered stand by the engineering firm Brice and Sainrapt at the Stade Jean Bouin, for the Club Athlétique de la Société Générale (currently the home of the rugby team Stade Français), illustrating in this way the development of sports stadiums since Garnier. Stadiums in continental Europe tended to have governmental or municipal bodies as clients, or were built for companies with wider industrial or financial concerns (as in the case of the Société Générale, a bank). They were often built on suburban sites, frequently figuring as part of a centrally administered wider building programme. Architects and engineers were quick to exploit the potential of ferro-concrete cantilevered stands, which not only gave the spectators a view of 150

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41  Tony Garnier’s Stade Gerland illustrated in Sigfried Giedion, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Concrete, 1928

151

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events unimpeded by pillars supporting the roofs of stands, but also chimed with modern architecture’s general rhetoric of lightness and innovative supporting structures. Soccer grounds in Britain, by contrast, were generally built with the soccer club itself as the client, which resulted in grounds that were used for soccer alone, normally situated in cramped urban residential areas and built piecemeal. If other sports also used the stadium, such as the cycle track at Villa Park in Birmingham, these tended to be edged out by soccer’s predominance. Ferro-concrete stands were generally shunned in favour of steel frames supporting the roof, but also blocking part of the crowd’s field of vision, as British engineers looked to industrial precedents in Victorian steel and brick-built factories and remained largely unaware of modernist architecture in general and the specific place that sporting architecture was beginning to occupy in architectural debate. In examining the issues of sport, internationalism and the stadium, the remainder of this chapter will focus on two stadium projects, one that was realised and one that was not. The two stadiums were planned by diametrically opposed political regimes, the USSR and fascist Italy, although here as elsewhere the two states have more in common than might initially be supposed. Both projects involved prominent figures from the modern movement. In the case of the USSR my primary focus will be on the architect Nikolai Ladovsky and the participation of Meyer’s associate El Lissitzky. In Italy, the stadium was the work of the engineer Pier Luigi Nervi, associated with the Gruppo 7 modern architecture collective. Both stadiums were promoted internationally by the regimes that supported their planning and both were written about by prominent critics in the architectural press. But the Soviet stadium promotes the rhetoric of internationalism, even in its name, ‘The International Red Stadium’, while the Italian stadium, ‘The Giovanni Berta’, reveals in its name a specifically fascist and nationalist identity – Berta being viewed as an early fascist martyr following drowning in the River Arno – and is part of a wider project to develop a specifically Italian form of modern architecture. As such, the two stadium projects permit an exploration and interrogation of Meyer’s ideas on sport, international standardisation and identity, questions which also go to the heart of modernist architecture and internationalism more generally. The International Red Stadium, Moscow and the yacht club of El Lissitzky If Meyer had one stadium in mind when he wrote his essay, it was probably the International Red Stadium in Moscow. Projected to be built in the Lenin Hills (formerly the Sparrow Hills) above the city, the stadium was planned by the rationalist architect Nikolai Ladovsky working with the Architecture Department of VKhUTEMAS (the famous Higher State Artistic and Technical Workshops, which employed most of the leading constructivist artists of the time), who assumed responsibility for the site, having won the commission in 1924. The stadium was a prestigious project for the fledgling Soviet state and Ladovsky’s model of it was included in Konstantin Melnikov’s radical Soviet Pavilion in 152

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the famous 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris. The project would have been particularly known to Meyer through the involvement of El Lissitzky, who designed the yacht club (plate 11) on the banks of the Moscow River, which flowed through the 3.5 kilometre-long site. Lissitzky acted as a bridge between the Swiss-based constructivist group ABC, of which Meyer was an important member, and the Soviet group ASNOVA (Association of New Architects), led by the stadium’s architects Ladovsky and Vladimir Krinsky, with whom Lissitzky had taught at the VKhUTEMAS before he left for the West in 1921. Selim O. Khan-Magomedov describes how ‘Lissitzky did much to disseminate the idea of ASNOVA, both in the USSR and abroad. … He acted as its appointed external representative, kept in close touch with Ladovsky and published a number of rationalist projects in ABC and other journals.’17 It was largely through Lissitzky’s agency that ASNOVA attracted an international membership that included Teige, Le Corbusier and Meyer’s ABC colleague, the Dutchman Mart Stam, at the same time that he was building up his own international contacts. Lissitzky not only contributed to ABC, but was instrumental in its founding. He contracted tuberculosis in 1924, which necessitated a spell in a Swiss sanatorium, and he met Stam and the Swiss members of ABC en route to discuss their new publication, ABC Beiträge zum Bauen (ABC Contributions on Building), providing material on his own and ASNOVA’s architectural projects, particularly for the special double issue of ABC devoted to Soviet architecture in 1925.18 Shortly after his arrival in the West, Lissitzky had founded his own review, a trilingual publication titled Veshch’/Gegenstand/Objet (Object), in collaboration with the writer Ilya Ehrenburg. In ‘The Blockade of Russia Is Coming to an End’, the editorial for the first issue, the pair proposed that: [T]he fundamental feature of the present age is the triumph of the constructive method. We find it just as much in the new economics and the development of industry as in the psychology of our contemporaries in the world of art. Objet will take the part of constructive art, whose task is not to adorn life but to organize it. […] We observe that the development of communal activity in the course of recent years has been influenced by various phenomena that lie outside the so-called pure arts. Objet will, however, investigate examples of industrial products, new inventions, the language of everyday speech and the language of newspapers, the gestures of sport, etc. – in short, everything that is suitable as material for the conscious creative artist of our times.19

Lissitzky also collaborated with Ehrenburg on his book 6 Tales with Easy Endings, providing the illustrations. One of these shows a soccer player (plate 12) photomontaged against Lissitzky’s own design of geometric shapes, the vocabulary of what he termed his ‘Proun’ works, which he described as being ‘the interchange station between painting and architecture’.20 The player’s attention seems fixed on a black circle suspended at the top of the design and echoed in 153

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a series of arcs that curve down to surround him. This black circle can easily be read as a ball, in the same way that Lissitzky’s mentor Kazimir Malevich included a small green circle at the foot of his Suprematism. Painterly Realism of a Footballer. Colour Masses in Four Dimensions of 1915. The idea of translating one of his Proun works into architecture appealed to Lissitzky, and following his return to the Soviet Union in 1925 he devoted much of his time to it, whether through his assumption of the role of joint head of the architecture faculty at VKhUTEMAS, his editing of the only issue of ASNOVA News and consideration of an exhibition of the group’s work in Western Europe, or, more specifically, his design for the yacht club as part of the International Red Stadium project. He became involved in the project shortly after his return to the Soviet Union and mentions it several times in correspondence. His letters back to his future wife, Sophie Küppers, who remained in Germany at this point, document his initial involvement. At the start of July 1925 he writes that ‘I am also being dragged in to help with the work of completing the International Stadium’.21 This apparent reluctance needs to be seen in the context of a recent resident of a sanatorium writing a letter to his distant partner in which he is outlining the heavy workload he is about to assume at VKhUTEMAS and with ASNOVA. The following week he writes that work with Ladovsky on ASNOVA News is progressing well and that he ‘will also make full use of the personal relationships I established with the creative influences in Europe’ to publicise the group’s work. He continues: ‘Next week I am going to the Lenin Hills, where the International Stadium is being built, so as to take a look at the thing myself. Maybe I will take on the building on the river bank for water-sports.’22 In a letter to one of his network of international contacts, the typographer Jan Tschichold, he writes that: ‘I am also working on some architectural designs for the International Red Stadium in Moscow’, and the fact that he does not go into further detail suggests that he assumes that Tschichold has some familiarity with the stadium project.23 In early August the design process was well underway; as he wrote to Küppers: ‘I am working on a design for the yacht club for the Lenin Hills project, and am pretty well finished with the main planning. It is three-dimensional in conception, I hope something will come of it.’24 By mid-August the designs were completed and Lissitzky sent her the plans, along with a lengthy account of the process and his feelings about it: Dear Muttilein, it’s far too long since I wrote to you, I make no excuses, I’m naughty, – but I have really been working: a design for a yachtclub is not a poster for Pelikan. After several years it is my first, actual building (apart from the tiny little sketch for Orselino). I have to hand in drawings to the Works Department and then go to the technical control place to obtain permission for carrying out the work. But it’s not the problem itself, not the technical aspect of solving it, that has had me racking my brains, it’s the artistic aspect! I have really slaved at it. I have worked myself stupid. I couldn’t get to sleep at night. I felt like a miserable worn-out old horse, my feet were crumbling beneath me (can’t stand long). Now the thing’s over and done with, then comes the afters, 154

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the pudding, the painting of the facades and the sides. It is interesting to follow the plans now, in order to see that the whole difficulty lies in becoming simpler. I am enclosing the final version for you. I don’t think I can set it out in a more elementary way than this. The complex is situated on the slope of a river bank; the three big red horizontal lines – these are terraces; the zig-zag flash on the diagonal is a winding road that constitutes a way down from the top to the bottom, past the terraces. At the bottom right is the large hall. The roofs are designed as grandstands for regattas. This work is based on a Proun, which I will sketch for you later some time. With a task like this where various requirements have to be satisfied at the same time (here there’s ski-ing in winter and water sports in summer) and the construction and material (wood) have to be of the simplest kind, naturally one cannot find a solution which is completely gratifying to oneself personally. Anyway, enough of this.25

But Lissitzky returns to the subject of the yacht club one further time in his correspondence with Küppers. In November 1925 he clarifies to her that it was a paid commission that would be built as part of the overall complex: ‘The regatta house wasn’t a competition, but a thing which was planned for the stadium complex. It will be incorporated, according to my sketch-plans, into the overall design, and is to be built. I received some payment for that – but that’s all spent long ago.’26 Lissitzky’s design does show a marked resemblance to his Proun works. In particular it comes close to Proun 1A The Bridge I, 1919, with which it shares prominent horizontal elements combined with a massing of architectural spaces on one side of the design.27 That work was clearly still on his mind in 1925, as another similar architectural design, simply titled Bridge, also dates from the year of the yacht club. As Lissitzky wrote in an essay for Das Kunstblatt, the aim in the Soviet Union ‘was to make effective in architecture the entire energy which was crystallized in the new painting’.28 The aerial axonometric, which provides the same sort of viewpoint as that of Proun 1A, also gives an indication of just how steep the site of the yacht club was. The visitor to the club, who would probably approach the stadium from the top of the hill, where the main stadium was, rather than by river, has several options. The spectator could stay and stand on the roofs of the structure and watch the action, or descend to the river in a variety of ways. They could effectively by-pass the club by using the steep set of stairs to the right of the building, simply passing through a gateway surmounted by a suspended red circle at the top of the flights of stairs. Alternatively, three main terraces at the front of the building offer an architectural promenade. Coloured red on the drawing, these are initially flat but then gently slope to meet two smaller intermediate horizontal terraces (coloured black on the drawing), which have sharper ramps to connect the pedestrian back to the next main terrace. This echoes the way that footpaths up steep hills are generally formed of switchbacks. The spectators could stop at any of the horizontal terraces and watch, or they could walk down the terraces, their view alternating between 155

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approaching the main architectural elements and walking away from it, allowing views of the river and the rest of the site. This tour, if followed to the end, would leave the viewer alongside the large hall, where a flight of stairs leads off the building, paralleling the final flight of stairs from the route under the gateway. A third way of descending the hill, one that combines elements of the first two routes, is offered by the flights of stairs running between the three main horizontal terraces. If the exterior form of the building corresponded closely to Lissitzky’s painterly practice, which had been formed by his experience with Malevich in Vitebsk at the end of the 1910s, then a photomontage project for an interior at the complex was based on the fotopis’ (literally ‘photo painting’) photomontage procedures that he had perfected during his stay in the West in works such as Self-Portrait (Constructor), 1924, which he now turned towards sporting ends. Fotopis’ was a photomontage technique that relied not on cutting and pasting (as his soccer player for Ehrenburg had), but on darkroom superimposition and manipulation. Record (Runner), 1926 (figure 42) was the first photographic work that Lissitzky completed following his return to the Soviet Union and was designed as a photographic frieze either for the interior of the yacht club or for the similarly Proun-inspired sports club of Mikhail Korzhev.29 At the same time Lissitzky produced another image, Footballer (figure 43), which it is also reasonable to assume is part of the same project, since it employs many of the formal techniques of Record (Runner) and shares the sporting themes of the

42  El Lissitzky, Record (Runner), c. 1925 156

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43  El Lissitzky, Footballer, c. 1925

athletic picture.30 There is an uncanny similarity between these two sporting works by El Lissitzky and the works by T. Lux Feininger and Hajo Rose produced within a few years of them. Lissitzky’s Footballer shows players leaping for a ball, as Feininger’s Sport at the Bauhaus does. Record (Runner) depicts an athlete in the process of clearing an obstacle, as does Rose’s High-Jumper in front of the Prellerhaus. What is more, architecture plays a significant part in the work of all 157

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three photographers. There are of course differences and these are not simply confined to Lissitzky’s decision to deploy bands across his works: the high-jumper Büttner has achieved his goal once he has crossed his obstacle and so Rose has captured him at a moment of sporting success; the hurdler must run on to the next hurdle or the finish line, so the race is still very much in progress and the athlete’s gaze is directed towards the next obstacle, not this one. In terms of photographic technique, Lissitzky’s images employ superimposed images, whereas those of Feininger and Rose do not. Record (Runner) exists in four major versions. The simplest shows a single runner clearing a hurdle, his eyes focussed straight ahead with the lanes of the running track clearly visible (see figure 44). This figure is montaged against a cityscape which is doubly exposed and in which several illuminated signs can be read twice: an advert for Coca-Cola appears above his head and signs running vertically read ‘Central Theatre’, ‘Candy’ and ‘Strand’. All the versions make use of this cityscape, a view of New York’s Times Square, which was taken from the prominent architect Erich Mendelsohn’s book Amerika.31 Although the book was published in 1926, Margarita Tupitsyn believes it was probably brought by Mendelsohn on a visit to Moscow at the end of 1925.32 A second version (Runner in the City at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) shows the same image with a series of white columns superimposed on it, the result of Lissitzky cutting the first version and then reprinting it.33 Although the figure is perfectly aligned, the columns are not, in fact, absolutely vertical, and the spacing between them varies slightly, so that the lines of the track are not completely straight. Despite the temptation to read this image as evidencing a machinic superimposition, El Lissitzky’s hand is still visible. In a third, no attempt is made to impose a homogeneous set of vertical strips on the runner.34 Instead, as the photograph is read from left to right, the width of the white strips increases and the intervals between the strips decreases. A final version introduces a second, spectacled runner into the action. Running against the same background as his earlier counterpart and also in the process of clearing a hurdle, this second runner is again set against the background of Mendelsohn’s view of Times Square. Now the runners are doubled, although since they are clearly not the same athlete, this doubling is not simple. Neither is the background replicated exactly. Behind the new runner the word ‘Candy’ is still clearly visible twice, whereas it is now absent from cityscape behind the original runner. Both runners are comparatively disembodied, as compared to the original version. This new version also has vertical strips superimposed on it and, like the third version, they are not evenly spaced. Reading from the left-hand side of the double-runner image, the intervals between the strips again narrow, while the strips themselves become thicker and are closer together. At the centre point of the image this system is reversed so that the closely grouped thick bands become thinner and more separated as they move across the original runner and off to the right. But this is not a simple modular system. In all there are thirty-six white vertical lines placed over the runners. Seventeen of these appear on the left-hand half of the image, and the 158

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44  El Lissitzky, Record, c. 1926

159

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spaces between them tend to contract (albeit irregularly) to the central point where the lines are grouped closest together. The right hand side of the image, where the vertical bands tend to become more spaced out once again, has nineteen vertical stripes. If we examine the detail of the photograph behind the bands, we can see that the cityscape behind the new runner takes up more than half the image, ending after the nineteenth band, slightly to the right of the centre point. This complicates Tupitsyn’s reading of the ‘spreading of white vertical strips’ in this version as ‘an imitation of changing film stills’.35 In fact Lissitzky is playing a game with one-point perspective. At the centre of the frieze, where we would expect to find the vanishing point, we find none. The doubled image of Times Square, which we would expect to find recommencing at this point, does not, with the background instead still belonging to the new runner, eliding our expectations. Only to the right of this does the background of the original runner commence. In letting us down, the grid system perhaps emphasises the unequal nature of the sporting contest; the lead runner takes up more space, the runner behind is destined to reach the same point only after the leader has dominated and vacated it. Our interest in the contest is centred on the relation of the two runners and we focus on the interval between them at the same time that we register the deficit of the runner behind, marked out by the slight imbalance of the vertical strips: there, where he should be, he is not. Footballer completely obviates any temptation to read Record (Runner) as connected to film. For here the bands are not only irregularly spaced as they become narrower and closer together towards the foot of the image, but they also change colour from black to white as they move from left to right. From the top of the image, long bands of black become progressively shorter as the lines descend to meet the ball, which is bisected by the only band of pure white. Beneath the ball the proportion of black to white again increases, so that the overall effect is of a splayed black chevron which intervenes in the picture much as the triangles do in Lissitzky’s celebrated propaganda poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, 1920, except here the ball is not penetrated but serves as the tip of the chevron, the focus of attention. The ball can also be read as being suspended by the geometry of the two black triangles, in much the same way as Lissitzky suspended a red circle over the gateway to the set of stairs in the yacht club. Or we could think back to his previous soccer montage, for Ehrenburg’s 6 Tales with Easy Endings, which also suspends a soccer ball by means of Proun devices. Formally, the division into black and white echoes the halves on the two most prominent players’ shirts, directing their energies and their bodies towards the ball by pushing the black half, furthest from the ball in both cases, towards it. Again, Lissitzky plays a trick with one-point perspective: if the inner, left-hand edges of the wedges are aligned, they meet at a point just to the right of the ball; if the right-hand edges of the wedges are traced, then they meet the upper half of the ball, above the white line that bisects it (which in any case does not run through its centre). Although it is the focus of the players’ attention, the ball’s location is not definitively fixed. In addition, the ball itself is multiplied 160

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in white, coming to meet the forehead of the airborne player in a way that is perhaps more realistic than the actual positioning of the ball and which suggests a number of alternate trajectories that the ball could have taken. The logic of the banding system here runs against that of Record (Runner); as the bands get closer together they also become narrower. But the skewed symmetry of Record (Runner) is preserved by the wedges that narrow towards the ball and then expand again. Again, the action of the footballers is montaged against a second image, although in this case it is far less clear what that image is, compared to Record (Runner)’s view of Times Square. Lissitzky’s contribution to the stadium project as a whole was comparatively minor. The yacht club was a small structure when compared to Ladovsky’s stadium for forty-five thousand spectators.36 Indeed a work that is generally attributed to Lissitzky, described as ‘Design for a Sports Ground’ and, more accurately as ‘International Red Stadium on the Lenin Hills, ground plan’ (plate 13) clearly shows the scale of the whole site.37 Lissitzky’s yacht club is nestled into the corner of the stadium, between the river and the end of a curved sweep of terracing. In addition to the stadium and the yacht club, the site was to contain an entrance arch, kiosks, hostels for competing athletes, a landing stage for access from the river, agitational and entertainment facilities, including an open air theatre. As befitted a flagship Soviet project run by the VKhUTEMAS and ASNOVA, there was a high degree of collaborative work under the overall direction of Ladovsky. The project was also set as an exercise for diploma students in Ladovsky’s studio. Turkus was responsible for the design of the kiosks, which were photographed shortly after their construction (figure 45). The kiosks appear to have been built from wood and, as with Lissitzky’s yacht club, this probably represented a compromise. Lissitzky’s frustration at being forced to use wood was evident in one of his letters to Sophie Küppers, and the design for the yacht club dates to the year before his essay ‘Architecture of the Steel and Reinforced-Concrete Frame’ was published in the Soviet journal Stroitel’naia promyshlennost’ (The Building Industry). But such modern materials were part of the design for the main stadium. A drawing for the cantilevered stands by Korzhev shows viewing boxes suspended between exposed steel supports, with the whole system also acting as a roof covering for at least some of the seats in the two-tiered stand below. Alexandra Köhring confirms that ‘the stands were supposed to be made of steel constructions sheathed with reinforced concrete so the area below the stands could be used to facilitate the coordination of mass gatherings’. 38 Korzhev also produced a design for the open-air theatre. Vladimir Popov designed the accommodation for competitors, a series of blocks set back from one another to maximise light. In 1928 the founder of de Stijl, Theo van Doesburg, concluded his review of Soviet architectural projects with a consideration of the International Red Stadium, illustrating it with Korzhev’s design for the main tribune stand. Distinguishing it from more utopian proposals, such as Tatlin’s Monument for the Third International, Lissitzky’s own Wolkenbügel office block or Malevich’s 161

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45  Kiosks at the International Red Stadium site, designed by Turkus at Nikolai Ladovksy’s studio c. 1925

architectons, van Doesburg also ended by reaffirming the necessity for a stadium architecture that adequately reflected the modernity of sport: The design for a Moscow stadium does not belong to the category of Cheopsfantasies either. It is very ingenious and exceptionally economical, conceived completely in iron and concrete, and will undoubtedly signify a radical innovation in the field of stadium construction. Our modern sports require a completely new type of stadium, which our modern techniques and materials will be able to create.39

Ironically, by the time that the essay appeared work on the stadium had come to an end and the project was to remain as firmly on the drawing board as those utopian proposals which van Doesburg had readily dismissed. A 1927 geodetic survey had concluded that the site could not support an extended structure such as the stadium (although the site is now occupied by Moscow State University) and the project had run into financial difficulties. Lissitzky went on to design his own unrealised sports stadium in Smolensck.40 Sport continued to play a key role in the Soviet Union’s vision of citizenship and, as discussed in the previous chapter, the subject was a popular one for Soviet artists including Aleksandr Rodchenko, Gustav Klucis and Solomon Telingater. Stadiums in fascist Italy Modern sport would get the new type of stadium that van Doesburg was calling for, but it would come from a country under the control of an ideology diametrically opposed to that of the Soviet Union. When the Giovanni Berta stadium was 162

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completed in 1932 in Florence (now renamed the Artemio Franchi stadium and still home to the city’s soccer club, Fiorentina), its name paid homage to a fascist attacked for appearing in a black shirt at a Florentine demonstration shortly after the murder of Spartaco Lavagnini, a communist leader and publisher. Pursued by demonstrators, Berta was thrown from the Ponte Sospeso but clung on to the railing, whereupon his attackers reportedly hacked at his hand until he fell to his death in the Arno.41 Berta quickly became established as a fascist martyr and was commemorated in a variety of ways by the regime, including the naming of the new stadium designed for Florence by Pier Luigi Nervi. As with many other stadium projects in Europe, the Giovanni Berta was a statement of civic pride, a multi-sports facility for use by the local population and the home to an elite sports team, in this case the recently formed AC Fiorentina. None of these factors necessarily prescribes a modern style and in fact nearby Bologna had built a stadium, Stadio Littoriale (now Stadio Dall’Ara, still home to Bologna FC), which combined antique and medieval influences and shielded its reinforced concrete amphitheatre behind local brick. The main entrance to the Littoriale was a giant, brick-built, six-storey tower which contained a large, arched recess that faced the pitch, positioned high above the halfway line, which framed a bronze statue of Mussolini on horseback, commemorating his inauguration of the stadium on the back of a white horse in 1926. The antique connotations of the stadium reached a peak with the construction of Rome’s Stadio dei Marmi (Stadium of Marbles), completed in 1928, in which Enrico del Debbio arranged statues of naked classical athletes, some carrying twentieth-century sporting equipment, around the periphery of the stands. Nervi’s Berta stadium provided a very different version of fascist architecture, one that was in line with developments in international modernism. A principal difference is found in the construction of the towers in Bologna and Florence. A slim, free-standing Marathon tower was first used by Jan Wils, a former member of de Stijl, in the 1928 Olympic stadium in Amsterdam. Built of brick, but slender and topped by the first Olympic flame, Wils’s Marathon tower connects to the squatter, more triumphal, design in Bologna through its material and its lack of integration into the design of the stadium itself. In contrast, Nervi’s fifty-five metre reinforced concrete tower (figure 46) was a sleek, elegant form that emerged from the back of the stand directly opposite the covered tribune. At its base, projecting out over the stand, was a platform that functioned as an oratorical podium during political rallies. The tower itself was fronted with curved glass which was illuminated at night, and a lift served the top of the tower, from where the stadium announcer viewed the action below. The concrete narrowed subtly towards this point, emphasising the thinness of the structure, and the construction was topped off by a long radio antenna, as if to underscore the modernity of the project. The only element of the tower’s mix of concrete, glass and communications technology that had an antique reference was the fascist symbol, the fasces, an axe head emerging from a bundle of rods, which was placed on the tower and which the fascists had adopted from ancient Rome. 163

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46  Gino Barsotti, photograph of Pier Luigi Nervi’s Stadio Communale Giovanni Berta, Florence, 1932

Nor did Nervi’s innovation and commitment to modern material end there: the crowd entered the top of stands after ascending elaborate exposed concrete staircases (figure 47) and the tribune stand had an impressive, almost cantilevered, roof. An architect, Giovanni Koenig, recalled that an expert on reinforced concrete was of the opinion that such a structure was likely to be unstable and that this 164

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47  Gino Barsotti, photograph of Pier Luigi Nervi’s Stadio Communale Giovanni Berta, Florence, 1932

meant that ‘it was taken for sure that the roof would collapse. The day that the supporting scaffolding was to be removed, poor Nervi found the work site deserted. With the help of a few assistants who believed in him, he set about hammering out the wedges that had been placed between the reinforced supports.’42 Such a gravity-defying structure, which had been constructed in only 120 days, attracted 165

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widespread interest, as did the stadium as a whole. The Berta stadium has clear links to the Mussolini stadium in Turin (now the Olympic stadium, venue for the 2006 Winter Olympics and home to the soccer club Torino and, up until 2011, its great rival, Juventus), which was completed in 1933 in a period of only 180 days in time to host the World Student Games of that year (figure 48). Like its Florentine counterpart, the Turin stadium had a tall Marathon tower, with a glass façade to illuminate it at night, although in this case it was free standing, with the words ‘Stadio Mussolini’ running vertically down its length. As with the Berta stadium, the Mussolini stadium was designed for a variety of sports: soccer, rugby, athletics and swimming. Both stadiums were widely analysed in Italian and international architecture magazines and journals. Not surprisingly, the Italian futurists were enthusiastic, pronouncing the Berta stadium ‘a truly fundamental work for our sporting architecture’.43 Giuseppe Pagano, editor of the magazine Casabella from 1933, architect and critical champion of the modernist architectural movement Italian rationalism, believed that Nervi had arrived at a ‘true Rationalism’.44 Although he was never formally a rationalist, Nervi’s Berta stadium exhibits many of the principles of its buildings: the stadium does not have superfluous decoration; its structural skeleton is evident; its roof is cantilevered; and the glass façade of the Marathon tower functions as a corner window.45 Given this close connection, and as the stadium is often discussed in conjunction with Florence’s Santa Maria Novello railway station, designed by the rationalist ‘Tuscan Group’, discussion of the

48  Stadio Mussolini postcard, n.d. 166

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stadium’s international significance must be situated in the context of wider debates on national character, politics and modern architecture, debates in which the rationalists and their critical champions were the most prominent Italian participants. The Italian fascists deliberately kept their cultural policies open. In contrast to the German Nazis’ condemnation of ‘Degenerate’ modern art, the Italian regime supported an eclectic mix of styles, which accounts for the variety between Rome’s heavily classical Stadio dei Marmi, Bologna’s massive brick Stadio Littoriale and Florence’s sleek, reinforced concrete Stadio Berta. This latter had the clearest ties to developments in international modernism, which was important to the fascists as a demonstration that Italy was truly a world power. To a country bent on rapid industrialisation but fearing a dilution of its still youthful national identity, ‘fascism offered a fantasy of a mass society that allowed economic development without harm to social boundaries and national traditions. Many different models of modernity competed for legitimacy under the dictatorship, but all of them presented fascism as a movement that would forestall the spread of standardization and degeneration while bringing to Italians the benefits of contemporary life.’46 Equally important to the regime was an emphasis on the ‘Italian’ quality of its modern architecture. As Emilio Gentile has written, the futurists’ early adherence to the fascist programme can be explained by the appeal of ‘creating an “Italian modernity” that would also be a model for a new European civilization’.47 Gruppo 7’s first public pronouncement asserted that: ‘It remains for Italy to give maximum development to the new spirit, to carry it to its logical conclusion, until it dictates a style to other nations, as it has in the great periods of the past.’48 Modern architects were prominent beneficiaries of this aspect of fascism, with the Italian regime becoming the ‘most prolific Western state in its support of modern architecture’, according to Terry Kirk.49 Although rationalism was heavily indebted to the works of Le Corbusier, who travelled to Italy in 1934, visiting the Olivetti factory, its leading proponents also tried to claim a distinctive Italian lineage for their work. Giovanni Michelucci, the lead architect of the Tuscan Group and also the tutor of Raffaello Fagnoni, the architect of the Stadio Mussolini, published photographs of two modernist villas alongside Tuscan farmhouses in order to demonstrate the links between them. As Claudio Lazarro describes: ‘Investigation of rural and vernacular architecture flourished in Italy in the ′30s, as a demonstration of italianità, and framed by the interest of the Rationalists.’50 Pagano dedicated himself to photographing Italian rural architecture at the same time that he was editing Casabella, a journal whose design and content demonstrated a profound knowledge of and engagement with developments elsewhere in Europe in architecture, typography and photography.51 It was in the pages of Casabella that a particularly interesting debate took place between Pagano and Marcel Breuer, the former member of the Bauhaus and colleague of Meyer. In his 1934 summation of the modern movement, ‘Where Do We Stand?’, Breuer claimed that although indigenous national styles were of 167

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great interest, and ‘modern architects have the sincerest admiration and love for genuine national art, for old peasant houses … For us the attempt to build in a national tradition or an old-world style would be inadequate and insincere’,52 a view that clearly clashed with the rationalists’ adoption of a distinctly Italian form of modernism. Breuer then turned his attention to politics, claiming that the political beliefs of the client made no difference to the architect: ‘For instance, how does it help us to know that Stalin and the promoters of the Palace of the Soviets competition are communists? Their arguments are very much the same as those of any primitive-minded capitalistic, or democratic, or Fascist, or merely conservative motor-car manufacturer.’53 In Simon Martin’s words, glossing Pagano’s summary of Breuer’s argument, ‘the architect’s political background, whether he was a member of the Fascist syndicate or not, for example, was less important than his development of the best possible solutions to construction problems’.54 Pagano continued that ‘a Fascist can build the palace of the soviets in Moscow, a communist the Mole Littoria in Rome, just as the car manufacturer sells his vehicles without a care for the political colour of his client’.55 Pagano disagreed with this position, citing its ‘absence of sane political sense’.56 But he did concede that membership of a fascist syndicate alone ‘does not have the capacity to turn a violinist into a genius’.57 This example was not casually chosen. In 1928 Mussolini had given a speech to the directors of sixty newspapers in which he emphasised that there was to be no orthodox aesthetic programme for Italian fascism: ‘Just as it must be permissible to say that Mussolini, as a violin player, is a very modest dilettante, it must also be permissible to advance objective judgments on art, prose, poetry and theatre without the threat of veto due to an irregular party card … The party card does not give talent to those who don’t already possess it.’58 Nevertheless, Mussolini was at times prepared to advocate modern architecture. Defending Michelucci’s Tuscan Group station for Florence from accusations that it was too influenced by international modernism, Mussolini called the architects to the Palazzo Venezia saying: ‘Go and tell the young architects coming out of the architectural schools to don my uniform: “Do not be afraid to be brave”… I do not want to see case del Balilla [junior sports groups] or case del fascio with the architecture of Depretis’ day.’ ‘The station of Florence is beautiful’, he pronounced, adding ominously ‘and the Italian people will like the station of Florence.’59 The linking of the Balilla youth sporting movement to modern architecture is significant, since both modern sport and modern architecture serve to promote the idea of Italy as a youthful, vigorous nation. Martin quotes another architect, Giuseppe de Fenetti, as believing that the Balilla clubs were among ‘the most valuable creations of the new Italy. The organization of these young energies not only creates the athletes of tomorrow, but it also creates that popular spirit that will be seen in the stadia … as used to be seen in the theatres of yesterday.’60 The futurist Pippo Oriani claimed that ‘Sports stadia and youth clubs are at the avant-garde of all other constructions’.61 In an early piece of journalism, Mussolini 168

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himself had made a link between the stadium, modernity and national competition: Italy was no longer a place where ‘lovers once dreamed and nightingales once sang, the factory whistles are now screaming. Italy is pulling ahead in the great stadium where the Nations are running the great Marathon of World supremacy. … Italy is preparing itself to fulfil a major role in a new epoch of human history.’62 As part of the demonstration of Italy’s advanced position in this ‘race’, the stadiums in Florence and Turin gained widespread exposure. Rationalism was not merely an insular Italian movement, but sought to present itself internationally as a distinctly Italian variant of what was coming to be called the modern movement. Although the Berta and Mussolini stadiums had little connection to traditional Italian peasant buildings, they were promoted as distinctly Italian and, therefore, as distinctly fascist. Pier Maria Bardi, described by Claudio Fogu as ‘the prince of Italian modernist critics’, wrote of the Stadio Berta, ‘In Moscow, I felt the need to speak of it as a masterpiece’, and also according to Martin, acquired ‘a degree of notoriety for the stadium for describing it as the first example of Fascist architecture’.63 A model of the stadium was displayed at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, by which time it had already played host to several Italy international soccer matches, including the 1934 World Cup Quarter-Final against Spain. Martin cites documentation that attests to the attention paid to the stadium from Hungary, Sweden, France and Austria, while there is a clear influence on the Finnish architects Yrjö Lindegren and Toivo Jäntti and their design for Helsinki’s Olympic stadium, built between 1934 and 1938 but not used until 1952, owing to the cancellation of the 1940 games. This stadium has an even taller Marathon tower, at seventy-two metres, which became something of a symbol for the 1952 games as it appeared on the official logo (figure 49). Like the Berta’s, the tower is integrated into the stands of the stadium, emerging from the back of the stand next to the cantilevered roof of the grandstand. The Turin Mussolini stadium was the venue for the 1933 Littoriale games and garnered widespread attention in the domestic architectural press, including a lavishly illustrated essay by Luigi Lenzi in Architettura, the review of the National Syndicate of Fascist Architects, which reproduced the stadium on its front cover, as it had done with the Berta the previous year.64 In one sense, of course, this international exposure for the Italian stadiums could be taken as proof of Meyer’s contention that the world was becoming more international in general, that, as he put it in ‘The New World’, modern technologies would ‘liberate us from our national seclusion and make us part of a world community’.65 But this would be to ignore the way in which Italian rationalist architecture was conceived as a distinctly Italian response to modernity and as fascist. Bardi promoted the Berta stadium in the Soviet Union as fascist architecture. In fact, as Ruth Ben-Ghiat describes, Italian cultural responses were particularly complex in regard to the Soviet Union. Bardi was only one of many fascist visitors to Moscow; Ben-Ghiat claims that over fifty books on the Soviet Union were published between 1928 and 1935.66 Of course the two totalitarian regimes had 169

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49  Logo for the Helsinki Olympic Games in 1952, showing the tower of the Olympic Stadium designed by Yrjö Lindegren and Toivo Jäntti and completed in 1938

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much in common, but the early 1930s were a period in which there was greater stress in Italy on becoming aware of international movements, and also on the way that the Italian experience of and reaction to modernity could be distinguished from them. Lenzi described the Mussolini stadium as ‘profoundly and completely Latin and Fascist’ in his essay for Architettura.67 Architettura had itself changed both its design and its editorial position in 1932 to pay more attention to foreign projects, its chief editor stating that: ‘It is necessary to have a thorough knowledge of what others are doing in order to surpass them.’68 This had been part of the Italian rationalist project as it had developed in the 1920s. As such, the stadium in Florence can also be seen not as the realisation of Meyer’s prediction that the stadium would replace the art museum as part of a movement towards international standardisation, but as its negation. For the rationalists, architecture would always be intimately connected to questions of nationality, even if it shared some common international aspects. The stadiums were in effect no longer the venue for a competition between nations, as in Mussolini’s conception of international rivalries, but actors in that competition. This is of course just as true for those stadiums which stressed their international credentials, such as the International Red Stadium in Moscow and the display of its model at the 1925 Paris exhibition. This also has the effect of pointing out the limitations of Meyer’s argument: the choice of film stars is exclusively American and his choice of sports stars, particularly the relatively obscure figure of Breitensträter, betrays his own rather northern European bias. Many of the stadiums that were built during the 1920s and 1930s are now coming to the end of their useful lives, or have been so radically modified that their original structure has become all but invisible. The running and cycle tracks surrounding the soccer or rugby pitches distanced spectators from the action, which, even in continental Europe where it is a tradition, has become increasingly disliked by spectators. Despite cantilevering, many of the stadiums were designed as simple concrete bowls, which makes expansion problematic. But perhaps the most important factor is that the contemporary stadium has become part of a hospitality and entertainment complex that in addition to offering a sporting event can be expected to offer facilities for conferencing, a variety of restaurants (many not solely operating on match days), perhaps also a hotel or a casino. As with London’s Olympic stadium, or the new Juventus stadium in Turin, a major retail centre might be constructed at the same time. Integral to these schemes is normally a generous space for a museum. Although not devoted to art, might it be true to say that instead of carrying the day against the art museum, the stadium has incorporated it? There could be an element of truth in that claim, but it is also necessary to take account of recent changes to the nature of art museums, which have also increasingly turned to generating revenue as conference venues, from catering operations and from retail outlets. In fact, the stadium and the art museum no longer seem opposed, but aligned, and the building of one or the other, or both, remains as central to the prestige of the city and the country as it was during the period when Meyer wrote his essay. 171

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Notes 1 Hannes Meyer, ‘Die Neue Welt’, Das Werk, no. 7 (July 1926), 205–24. Translated as ‘The New World’, in Hannes Meyer, Bauten, Projekte und Schriften/ Building, Projects and Writings, ed. Claude Schnaidt, trans. D. Q. Stephenson (London: Alec Tiranti, 1965), 90–4. 2 Meyer, ‘The New World’, 91. The translation from which I am quoting gives ‘Mesendieck’ for ‘Mensendieck’, which I have corrected here; in the original, Meyer spells the last name correctly, but makes an error over her initial (‘Die Neue Welt’, 221). For more on Mensendieck, see Robin Veder, ‘Seeing Your Way to Health: The Visual Pedagogy of Bess Mensendieck’s Physical Culture System’, The International Journal of the History of Sport 28, nos 8–9 (May–June 2011), 1336–52. 3 Meyer, ‘The New World’, 92. 4 Meyer, ‘The New World’, 91. 5 Meyer, ‘The New World’, 91. 6 Meyer, ‘The New World’, 93. 7 Hannes Meyer, letter to Walter Gropius, 16 February 1927, quoted in Elaine S. Hochman, Bauhaus: Crucible of Modernism (New York: Fromm, 1997), 213. ABC was a Swiss-based architectural group to which Meyer belonged. Other members included Mart Stam and El Lissitzky, whose links to sport are discussed below. 8 Swantje Scharenberg, ‘Physical Education at the Bauhaus, 1919–33’, International Journal of the History of Sport 20, no. 3 (September 2003), 119. The interior quotes are translated from Meyer’s ‘Mein Hinauswurf aus dem Bauhaus. Offener Brief an Herr Oberbürgermeister Hesse, Dessau’, in Meyer, Das Tagebuch. 9 Scharenberg, ‘Physical Education at the Bauhaus’, 119. 10 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Jump Over the Bauhaus’, October 15 (Winter 1980), 102. 11 Walter Gropius, letter to Eckhart (Adolf Behne), 2 June 1920, quoted in Scharenberg, ‘Physical Education at the Bauhaus’, 115. 12 See John Bale, Landscapes of Modern Sport (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1994), 103. 13 For the Ibrox disaster and Leitch, see Simon Inglis, Engineering Archie: Archibald Leitch – Football Designer (London: English Heritage, 2005). 14 Karel Teige, The Minimum Dwelling, trans. Eric Dluhosch (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 385. 15 Sigfried Giedion, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferro-Concrete [1928], trans. J. Duncan Berry (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center, 1995). 16 Giedion, Building in France, 163. 17 Selim O. Khan-Magomedov, Pioneers of Soviet Architecture: The Search for New Solutions in the 1920s and 1930s, trans. Alexander Lieven, ed. Catherine Cooke (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 142. 18 For further details on Lissitzky’s relationship with ABC and his promotion of ASNOVA there, see Sima Ingberman, ABC: International Constructivist Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), chapters 1–3. 19 El Lissitzky and Ilya Ehrenburg, ‘The Blockade of Russia Is Coming to an End’, Veshch’/ Gegenstand/Objet, no. 1–2 (March–April 1922), translated by Stephen Bann in The Tradition of Constructivism, ed. Stephen Bann (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974), 55–6 (my italics). 172

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20 See El Lissitzky and Hans Arp, The Isms of Art [1925], facs. rpt (Baden: Lars Müller and Fondation Jean Arp und Sophie Taeuber-Arp, 1990), xi (translation modified). 21 El Lissitzky, letter to Sophie Küppers, 1 July 1925 in El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts, ed. Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, trans. Helene Aldwinckle and Mary Whitall (London: Thames and Hudson, 1968), 64. 22 El Lissitzky, letter to Sophie Küppers, 9 July 1925 in El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts, 64. 23 El Lissitzky, letter to Jan Tschichold, 22 July 1925, translated by David Britt in ‘Five Letters’, Situating El Lissitzky: Vitebsk, Berlin, Moscow, eds Nancy Perloff and Brian Reed (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2003), 244. Ladovsky’s model would already have gone on display at the Paris exhibition by this time. 24 El Lissitzky, letter to Sophie Küppers, 1 August 1925 in El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts, 65. 25 El Lissitzky, letter to Sophie Küppers, 13 August 1925 in El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts, 65–6. Pelikan was a German stationery company for which Lissitzky designed advertisements. 26 El Lissitzky, letter to Sophie Küppers, 5 November 1925 in El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts, 70. 27 Proun 1A: The Bridge I is reproduced as Plate 22 in El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts. 28 El Lissitzky, ‘Architecture in the USSR’, Das Kunstblatt, no. 2 (February 1925) translated in El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts, 372. 29 Peter Nisbet, Margarita Tupitsyn and Maria Gough all link the photographs of hurdlers to a frieze for the site. See: Nisbet, ‘Lissitzky and Photography’, in El Lissitzky (1890–1941): Architect Painter Photographer Typographer, exh. cat. Municipal Van Abbesmuseum, Eindhoven, 16 December 1990–3 March 1991 (then touring), 66; Tupitsyn, El Lissitzky: Beyond the Abstract Cabinet: Photography, Design, Collaboration (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 33; Gough (who suggests Korzhev’s sports club), ‘Lissitzky on Broadway’, Object: Photo. Modern Photographs: The Thomas Walter Collection 1909–1949. An online project of The Museum of Modern Art, eds Mitra Abbaspour, Lee Ann Daffner and Maria Morris Hambourg. http:// www.moma.org/interactives/objectphoto/assets/essays/Gough.pdf (accessed 31 May 2016), 6–7. 30 Nisbet has identified Record (Runner) as having been on display at the Moscow Polygraphic Exhibition in 1927 based on an examination of an installation view reproduced in Lissitzky-Küppers, El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts, fig. 202. See Nisbet, ‘Lissitzky and Photography’, 66, n. 5. The work below it is conceivably Footballer. 31 Knud Lönberg-Holm is named as the photographer in Gough, ‘Lissitzky on Broadway’, although it is credited to Franz Stoedtner in Werner Graeff, Es Kommt Der Neue Fotograf! (Berlin: Hermann Reckendorf, 1929), 24. 32 Tupitsyn, El Lissitzky: Beyond the Abstract Cabinet, 34 and n. 47. 33 The work is reproduced in Tupitsyn, El Lissitzky: Beyond the Abstract Cabinet, fig. 40. 34 This is titled The Runner in El Lissitzky (1890–1941): Architect Painter Photographer Typographer, fig. 114. 35 Tupitsyn, El Lissitzky: Beyond the Abstract Cabinet, 34. 36 Details of the history and scope of the project are given in Khan-Magomedov, Pioneers of Soviet Architecture, 513 and Alexandra Köhring, ‘Exploring the Power of the Curve: Projects for an International Red Stadium in 1920s Moscow’, in Euphoria and Exhaustion: Modern Sport in Soviet Culture and Society, eds Nikolaus Katzer et al. (Frankfurt: Campus, 2010), 41–60. Curiously, neither account mentions Lissitzky’s contribution. 173

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37 See El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts, plate 245 and El Lissitzky (1890–1941): Architect Painter Photographer Typographer, 195, plate 141, respectively. 38 Köhring, ‘Exploring the Power of the Curve’, 49. 39 Theo van Doesburg, ‘Architecture and Revolution – Revolutionary Architecture? Utopian Designs by Tatlin, El Lissitzky and others’, Het Bouwbedrijf 5, no. 20 (September 1928), translated in Theo van Doesburg, On European Architecture: Complete Essays from Het Bouwbedrijf, 1924–1931, trans. Charlotte I. Loeb and Arthur L. Loeb (Basel: Birkhaüser, 1990), 193. 40 Meyer also continued his interest in the stadium. Following his dismissal from the Bauhaus, Meyer immigrated to the USSR. He subsequently lived in Mexico, where he planned a sports and cultural centre that included a swimming pool, jai alai, tennis and basketball courts, and a stadium for thirty thousand people with a soccer pitch surrounded by a running track. See Hannes Meyer, ‘Project for a Sports and Cultural Centre in Mexico, 1941’, in Meyer, Bauten, Projekte und Schriften/Buildings, Projects and Writings, 80–1. 41 The details of this story (which is still a contested one in Italy) are drawn here from Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Staging Fascism: 18 BL and the Theater of Masses for Masses (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 203, n. 86 and Simon Martin, Football and Fascism: The National Game under Mussolini (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 153, to which the discussion of the stadium below is also indebted. 42 Giovanni Koenig, quoted in Martin, Football and Fascism, 157. 43 ‘Architettura Sportiva’, in La Città Nuova, 3, quoted in Martin, Football and Fascism, 160. 44 Terry Kirk, The Architecture of Modern Italy, vol. 2: Visions of Utopia, 1900–Present (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005), 190. 45 A detailed account of the movement is given in Richard A. Etlin, Modernism in Italian Architecture, 1890–1940 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). The principles, derived from the four essays the group published on architecture in 1926–27, are given on 250. 46 Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 3. 47 Emilio Gentile, ‘The Conquest of Modernity: From Modernist Nationalism to Fascism’, trans. Lawrence Rainey, Modernism/Modernity 1, no. 3 (September 1994), 58. 48 Il Gruppo 7, ‘Architecture’, trans. Ellen R. Shapiro, Oppositions 6 (Fall 1976), 89–90. 49 Kirk, The Architecture of Modern Italy, 137. 50 Claudio Lazarro, ‘Forging a Visible Fascist Nation: Strategies for Fusing Past and Present’, in Donatello Among the Blackshirts: History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy, eds Claudio Lazarro and Roger J. Crum (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 28. 51 For more details on the photographic projects of Michelucci and Pagano, see Robert Elwall and Valeria Carullo, Framing Modernism: Architecture and Photography in Italy 1926–1965 (London: Estorick Foundation, 2009). 52 Marcel Breuer, ‘Where Do We Stand?’, in Form and Function: A source book for the History of Architecture and Design, 1890–1939, eds Charlotte Benton, Tim Benton with Dennis Sharp (London: Crosby, Lockwood Staples in association with the Open University, 1975), 179. 53 Breuer, ‘Where do We Stand?’, 181. 54 Martin, Football and Fascism, 99. 174

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55 Giuseppe Pagano, ‘Politica e architettura’, Casabella, April 1935, quoted in translation in Martin, Football and Fascism, 99. 56 Pagano, ‘Politica e architettura’, quoted in Martin, Football and Fascism, 99. 57 Pagano, ‘Politica e architettura’, quoted in Martin, Football and Fascism, 99. 58 Benito Mussolini, ‘Il giornalismo come missione’, speech of 10 October 1928, quoted in translation in Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities, 23. 59 Benito Mussolini, quoted in translation in Kirk, The Architecture of Modern Italy, 104 (the ellipses and brackets are in Kirk’s quotation). Agostino Depretis held the office of Prime Minister on three separate occasions between 1876 and 1887. 60 Giuseppe de Finetti, Stadi. Esempi. quoted in translation, with ellipsis, in Martin, Football and Fascism, 99. 61 Pippo Oriani, ‘Architettura’, La Città Nuova, 6, 20 March 1934, quoted in translation in Martin, Football and Fascism, 98. 62 Benito Mussolini, ‘Un grande amico dell’Italia: Augusto von Platen’, Il Popolo, 3 July 1909, quoted in translation in Gentile, ‘The Conquest of Modernity’, 64. 63 Claudio Fogu describes Bardi as ‘the prince of Italian modernist critics’ in ‘To Make History Present’, Donatello Among the Blackshirts, 39. The remaining quotes are from Martin, Football and Fascism, 160. Bardi’s quote comes from an essay he devoted to the stadium that appeared in Casabella in 1933. 64 Luigi Lenzi, ‘Lo stadio Mussolini in Torino’, Architettura: Rivista del Sindacato Nazionale Fascista Architetti (July 1933), 403–16. Martin refers to the ‘huge amount of publicity’ for the Stadio Mussolini and summarises the approving reaction to it (Football and Fascism, 161 and 90–1). 65 Meyer, ‘The New World’, 91. 66 Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities, 38. 67 ‘L’architettura dell’opera è profondamente e compiutamente Latina e fascista’, Lenzi, ‘Lo stadio Mussolini in Torino’, 412. 68 Plinio Marconi, ‘review of Costruzione razionale della casa, by Enrico Griffini’, Architettura (January 1932), quoted in translation in Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities, 34–5.

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Conclusion: body politics

L’Esprit Nouveau, the journal that Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant edited together, welcomed the rise of the modern stadium: ‘The crowds, after centuries of indifference, are returning to the sporting arenas. They demand stadiums. The “Pershing” [stadium] is too small but it is a beautiful block of reinforced concrete which pleases modern eyes.’1 This comment’s marriage of the mass sporting crowd to modern architecture anticipates Bertolt Brecht’s address to ‘the sporting public … [in] those huge concrete pans’. It may well be that this was written by Ozenfant, given Le Corbusier’s dismissive remarks that ‘exhibition sport’ had nothing to do with ‘real sport’, although the latter also took an interest in stadium design.2 Here, it is the sole text that accompanies the announcement of soccer fixtures against Holland and Belgium and a rugby match against Scotland. ‘Sports’ also includes a brief note on a tennis competition (from which come the comments on the design of the courts at Sporting Club that I quoted in chapter two) and some achievements in the field of aviation. A page long, with three tenuously linked events, it is representative of the way in which L’Esprit Nouveau occasionally dealt with sport or incorporated it in passing during the earlier half of its run. However, this short article also appears immediately before the second of three essays on sport and physical culture written by Pierre Winter, a surgeon specialising in the larynx and friend of Le Corbusier, with whom he played basketball every week. The opening of his first essay echoes the format of L’Esprit Nouveau’s customary treatment of sport in a way that approaches parody: 27 November: Racing Club win the Paris Championship (Rugby) Foot-ball everywhere. 11 against 11 – 15 against 15; the teams, unified by one colour, link together their movements and the oval or round ball in the confines of green rectangles bordered with white, describe clear trajectories.3

Following another three scattered examples, Winter situates sport in the context of the wide interests of the journal: ‘Factories, music-hall, laboratories, exhibitions 176

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of paintings or automobiles, circuses and cinema – L’Esprit Nouveau wants to see everything. – Here it is on the sports ground.’ Leaving detailed reporting to the specialist press, the journal ‘wants to envisage the physical renaissance of the modern man in a broad sense. It wants to try to derive some rules, to draw some conclusions.’4 Winter’s diagnosis and prescriptions are simple enough, although they mark a great change in tone from the diverse thoughts on sport that have preceded them. Exercise should be based on scientific logic. Man is like a machine to the extent that one needs to understand how the components of the whole operate in order to achieve maximum performance. Winter advocates a national physical education programme from childhood, with mainly gymnastic exercises, to use muscles, inculcate rhythm and develop and maintain healthy organs. He suggests monitoring one’s pulse during exercise and promotes regulated breathing through the nose. Calls for a national physical education programme were not new, nor were regimes designed to enhance control of the body or to develop rhythm (in fact Albert Jeanneret, Le Corbusier’s brother, advertised his eurhythmics courses in L’Esprit Nouveau).5 But both have little to do with the elite competitive sport that I have been discussing. Towards the end of this first essay, however, Winter praises Jean Bouin, the runner who had died in the first year of the Great War, for his mastery of breathing, hailing him as ‘truly a man machine’ and writing that ‘this balance, this rhythm, which does not exist apart from in true champions, gives to their appearance a beauty which does not escape the attention of the sporting crowds’.6 He ends the piece by claiming that such champions are emerging in ever greater numbers, a vindication of a better understanding of scientific methods, and that man stands on the verge of breaking all records. Winter’s second essay, titled ‘The New Body’ picks up on this prognosis. Invoking Friedrich Nietzsche, he spuriously claims that ‘physical health underlies mental health, all balanced activity and all production, in art as in other areas’.7 Sport has spread to become ‘a fundamental element of this hectic modern life’. In a clearly Nietzschean vein he announces: a glimpse of an immense horizon toward which the tired scepticism of the modern will evade. Physical euphoria, intellectual euphoria, qualities of character rediscovered, the whole of moral life changed, other social conceptions, other aesthetic conceptions. The euphoria of the athlete is on course to permeate the world and its repercussions will be immense. Painters, sculptors, poets, you are all going to submit to it. A new artist is going to be born. He is born already.8

We have come across the sportsman as the harbinger of the new before. In the Introduction I quoted from F. T. Marinetti’s ‘The New Ethical Religion of Speed’, that ‘sportsmen are the first neophytes of this religion’. One of his defining features for a futurist was ‘Anyone who loves the open-air life, sport, and gymnastics, and plays close attention to the strength and agility of his own body’, while the ‘Manifesto of the Futurist Political Party’ demanded ‘Obligatory and legally enforced gymnastics, sport, and military education in the open air’.9 It is 177

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not hard to see the connections between this position and Marinetti’s emergent fascist allegiance. It has long been recognised that Pierre Winter was also fascist. From 1926, he contributed essays to the Nouveau siècle, the newspaper of Georges Valois’s Faisceau movement, including several which discussed Le Corbusier’s ideas and buildings.10 Following the collapse of the Faisceau he founded the similarly shortlived Parti fasciste révolutionnaire, where one of his chief associates was Philippe Lamour, another enthusiastic promoter of Le Corbusier’s theories on urbanism.11 Moreover, Le Corbusier’s association with the pair was not limited to these articles, but continued well into the 1930s, when both Winter and Le Corbusier were on the editorial board of Plans, edited by Lamour.12 Winter’s emphasis on the mechanisation of the body and its training was certainly congruent with Lamour’s own stress on machine aesthetics and youth, as examined by Mark Antliff, while his imagining of the birth of the sportsman chimes not simply with Marinetti’s ideas, but with the ‘palingenetic’ myths of renewal and rebirth identified by Roger Griffin as one of the most salient aspects of fascism.13 French fascism, perhaps to an even greater extent than its Italian predecessor, was a remarkable admixture of left-wing and right-wing positions. For this reason, two major histories of French fascism can claim that ‘Lamour became a left-wing showpiece for the Faisceau’ and that as ‘the Faisceau neared its end, the drive to the left became increasingly apparent’.14 Le Corbusier’s activities encompassed everything from speaking at the opening of the Faisceau’s new headquarters while simultaneously talking to the French trade union movement the CGT, to undertaking commissions for the Soviet Union and the Popular Front French government and maintaining an office under the war-time Vichy regime. Some of these engagements, added to his connections to Winter and Lamour, have contributed to a clouding of his political reputation, although he never declared his allegiance to any fascist project and, indeed, a better understanding of the specific conjuncture of fascism in France and its views on culture goes some way to explaining why a dialogue with the architect was thought important. How much of Winter’s fascist politics can already be discerned in the L’Esprit Nouveau essays on sport amidst his (widely shared) enthusiasms for Nietzsche and for promoting physical education is a moot point. The first attempts by the French government to impose compulsory gymnastics dated back to 1869 and the days of the Liberal Empire.15 Still more vexed is how much of his viewpoint we can attribute to the editors, although he does write in the name of the journal. This is a question that I will leave to one side. ‘There is no straight line from Verdun to Vichy’, as Romy Golan notes.16 It should also be observed here that Ozenfant ended up very far from Vichy; he wrote for the communist review Commune and in 1932 was a founder of the antifascist Association des Ecrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires.17 The last miscellaneous treatment of sport appeared alongside the final one of Winter’s essays. Now called ‘Actualités–Sports’ (Sports News), presumably to distinguish it from Winter’s more abstract treatment of the theme, this seems positively promiscuous in its range of interests, as compared to Winter’s 178

Conclusion

concentration on physical training, gymnastics and running. Opposing it are short lines on fencing, boxing, soccer, cross-country running, a rugby match in London, a water-speed record, a land-speed record set in Florida, the announcement of the course for racing auto-chenilles (half-tracked vehicles for use on snow or sand) and French governmental concerns over covert professionalisation in sport. Winter’s account seems arid and impoverished in comparison. For whatever reason, both types of sports coverage effectively come to an end. There is a reprint of a story by Maurice Raynal, ‘The Boxer and his Shadow’, an interview with Anatole France at the French grand prix and the photomontage of cars that I discussed in chapter two. But eleven issues pass before another ‘Sports’ column appears, in the final issue of the journal, and even this is largely given over to projects to refuel airships and aviation records. The varied treatment of sport in L’Esprit Nouveau can be broadened out. The aspects of exercise that Winter emphasises must be a part of any wide consideration of bodily culture and art in the first half of the twentieth century. But they are only that, a part. Views such as his and Marinetti’s do not, it seems to me, constitute a necessarily fascist position on sport and bodily training regimens, even though they might be espoused by fascists and are easily assimilated by regimes that are fascist. Equally, Winter draws on the work of French theorists of physical culture. Indeed, he adapts his training programme from that of another doctor, Maurice Boigey, Chief Medical Officer at the military training centre of Joinville. Boigey’s ideas were certainly not beyond reproach; his Physiologie générale de l’éducation physique, the work to which Winter refers, contains a chapter on eugenics.18 In her study of French masculinity, Joan Tumblety has found that Boigey was one of a number of figures who ‘provided a porous interface between the worlds of military training and physical culture, through which ideas about virility and degeneration travelled’.19 But such military and medical philosophies of bodily training often viewed competitive sport with mistrust, much as the German Turnen gymnasts that I discussed in chapter three did. In his attitude to spectator sport, Boigey was on the tolerant end of the spectrum; he conceded that the example of athletes such as Bouin might encourage the passive onlookers, with their ‘deformed bodies’, to overcome their ‘physical disgrace’.20 Boigey and other physical culturists formed their ideas largely independently of competitive sport, using it as an example only when it suited their purposes to do so, revealing an attitude that Tumblety identifies as an ‘ambivalence to competitive sport’.21 For this reason I have largely omitted them from consideration in my study. Even in the context of military performance, where concerns about virility and degeneration were ever present, the many essays that appeared in La Vie au Grand Air and elsewhere that took competitive sport as an ideal preparation for warfare demonstrate that other views were possible. The real limitations of viewing sport solely in the context of training the body lie not in what is stated, but in what is omitted. This view of sport misses what makes it truly modern: the sophisticated structures and networks that sustained elite sport, the buildings, the dissemination of news and results, the 179

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radical innovations, the popular allure. These are qualities acknowledged in the short articles on sport in L’Esprit Nouveau, but absent from Winter’s pieces. It is telling that Winter, writing during the explosion of interest in soccer and the continuing popularity of rugby in France, opens his essay with the words ‘Foot-ball everywhere’, only to turn his back on such sports for the remainder of the essays. To draw this distinction is not an attempt to establish bodily culture as ideologically suspect and thereby to absolve modern sport from being implicated in the political. Hopefully, sport’s deep-rooted connections to the political have emerged in previous chapters, and fascist governments were amongst the most prominent enthusiasts for modern sport. Mussolini made great capital out of the victories of Italy’s cyclists and soccer teams, despite John Foot’s belief that he ‘was not very interested in cycling’.22 The establishment of an Italian Corporation of Spectacle in 1930 placed professional athletes alongside those in the film and theatre industries.23 The Italian fascists’ stadium-building programme was evidence of an interest in sport at its most modern, as was the decision to hold a National Exhibition of Sport in Milan during the second half of 1935. Jeffrey T. Schnapp has analysed a series of such exhibitions, noting the way in which they are ‘characterized by swings in the pendulum between moderate and avant-gardist redactions of fascist modernism’.24 The exhibition on sport was one of the latter, featuring photomontage panels and rooms designed by the most avant-garde architects and artists working in Italy, the majority of whom acknowledged a debt to Le Corbusier. The rationalist Gruppo 7, for example, had hailed him as ‘an exceptional innovator … The example of this man will never be adequately admired’.25 In Milan, Guido Frette of the Gruppo designed the cycling room; another of the group’s members, Giuseppe Terragni, collaborated with Pietro Lingeri on the rooms for rowing and powerboats; the rationalist partnership of BBPR created the tennis room and the motor-racing room (figure 50), which featured a pantheon of the early heroes of Italian motor sport arranged in a photomontaged frieze around – almost inevitably – an early Fiat racing car, as if to underscore Marinetti’s famous point about the relative aesthetic merits of modern car design and antique sculpture. Mario Sironi, the presiding spirit of the design of the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution in 1932, and an admirer of El Lissitzky, produced the room for the Italian National Olympic Committee and the triumphal ‘greatest championship victories’ room, which made use of a series of interlocking rings similar to those used for the Olympics (figure 51).26 Emily Braun believes that the fascist use of photomontage ‘ultimately departed from the purely productivist model and secular modernity of El Lissitzky’s pavilion, combining factographic materials with traditional fine art elements and with relics steeped in the cult values of originality and authenticity’, in much the same way as Leni Riefenstahl borrowed of some of the techniques of Soviet filmmakers, but put them in the service of a classical view of the body that was also being promoted by the Nazi regime.27 In the tableau that opened Olympia, the connections between a factographic documentary, a fine-arts heritage evidenced through the influence of pictorialism, and the cult values of originality and authenticity 180

Conclusion

50  Banfi, Belgiojoso, Peressutti and Rogers, Motor racing room, National Exhibition of Sport, Milan, 1935

manifested in the tracing of the route of the torch from classical Greece to modern Berlin, as well as the transformation of antique statue into contemporary discus thrower, mean that Braun’s argument can also be applied to Riefenstahl. There were fewer of these cultic elements in the Sport exhibition than there had been in the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution, but the racing car, absolute symbol of modernity for the early years of futurism, had now finally taken on the status of relic. ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’ had envisaged the movement being ‘thrown into the wastebasket’ by ‘younger and stronger’ successors.28 Here instead was the realisation of that apotheosis of the racing car that Marinetti had proclaimed when he pronounced ‘racing-car circuits’, ‘combustion engines and rubber tires’ divine almost twenty years beforehand.29 That it took place in an exhibition devoted to sport and that Marinetti had hailed sportsmen as the first adherents this ‘New Ethical Religion of Speed’ was not coincidental. I have looked at a wide range of avant-garde artists whose works deal with sport, not simply to draw attention to this, but to attempt to account for why it was so and how it related to the conceptions of those artists and others about the place and role of competitive sport in their societies. The works I have studied have crossed media, from painting, photography, photomontage, film, performance 181

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51  Mario Sironi, ‘Greatest championship victories’ room, National Exhibition of Sport, Milan, 1935. University of Turin Architecture Library

(whether theatrical or sporting), architecture and various forms of writings, and have been shot through with ideologies. Sport has emerged as something that is not reducible to a stable set of meanings; it is a field rather than a practice. Visual culture’s reaction to sport both as part of that field and as a commentary on it is far from exhausted by my selection of works, and my final examples of the treatment of sport in L’Esprit Nouveau and the National Exhibition of Sport under Mussolini are designed not to tie things neatly together, but to illustrate some of the rich complexities of the subject. Notes 1 Anon. ‘Sports’, L’Esprit Nouveau, 15 (1922), 1754: ‘Les foules, après des siècles d’indifférence, sont revenues aux arènes sportives. Elles réclament des stades. Le “Pershing” est trop petit mais il est un beau bloc de ciment armé qui satisfait les yeux modernes.’ The Pershing stadium was built by the American military shortly after the First World War and subsequently gifted to the French nation. 2 For Le Corbusier’s views, see chapter two. For his interest in stadium design, see Rémi Baudouï and Arnaud Dercelles, ‘The Corbusian Sportive Body’, in Le Corbusier: The Measures of Man, eds Olivier Cinqualbre and Frédéric Migayrou (Paris and Zurich: Centre Pompidou and Scheidegger and Spiess, 2015), 80. 3 Dr Winter, ‘Sports’, L’Esprit Nouveau, 14 (1922), 1675: ‘27 novembre: Le Racing Club gagne le championnat de Paris (Rugby). 182

Conclusion

4

5 6

7 8

9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

FOOT-BALL PARTOUT. 11 contre 11 – 15 contre 15; les équipes qu’une couleur unifie, articulent leurs gestes et le ballon ovale ou rond, dans les limites des rectangles verts bordés de blanc, décrivent de nettes trajectoires.’ Winter, ‘Sports’, 1675: ‘Usines, music-hall, laboratoires, expositions de peintures ou d’automobiles, cirques et cinéma – L’Esprit Nouveau désire tout voir. – Le voici sur les terrains de sport. Il laissera aux journaux spéciaux le soin de comptes rendu détaillés. Il veut envisager la renaissance physique de l’homme moderne dans un sens large. Il veut tenter d’en dégager des règles, d’en tirer des conclusions.’ For one example of a call for national physical education see Georges Prade, ‘L’Éducation physique future’, La Vie au Grand Air (15 June 1916), 12. Winter, ‘Sports’, 1677: Bouin ‘était bien l’homme machine, l’homme chronomètre. … Cet équilibre, ce rythme, qui n’existent que chez les véritables champions, donnent à leur allure une beauté qui n’échappe pas à l’observation des foules sportives.’ Dr Winter, ‘Le Corps nouveau’, L’Esprit Nouveau, 15 (1922), 1755: ‘Santé physique, base de santé mentale, base de toute activité équilibrée, de toute production, dans tous les domaines et dans celui de l’art aussi bien que dans les autres.’ Winter, ‘Le Corps nouveau’, 1756: ‘Horizon immense aperçu vers où va s’évader le septicisme[sic] fatigué du moderne. Euphorie physique, euphorie intellectuelle, qualités de caractères retrouvées, toute la vie morale changée, autres conceptions sociale, autres conceptions esthétiques. L’euphorie de l’athlète est en train de pénétrer le monde et son rayonnement sera immense. Peintres, sculpteurs, poètes, vous aller tous la subir. Un nouvel artiste va naître. Il est né déjà.’ F. T. Marinetti, ‘What is Futurism? Elementary Lessons’, in Marinetti, Critical Writings, ed. Günter Berghaus, trans. Doug Thompson (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006) 367; F. T. Marinetti, ‘Manifesto of the Futurist Political Party’, Critical Writings, 271. See Mark Antliff, Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art, and Culture in France, 1909–1939 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 143–5. Jean-Robert Pitte, Philippe Lamour, 1903–1922: Père de l’aménagement du territoire en France (Paris: Fayard, 2002), 30, 58. Pitte, Philippe Lamour, 56. For Lamour, see Antliff, Avant-Garde Fascism, 155–201. Robert Soucy, French Fascism: The First Wave, 1924–1933 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 117; Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, trans. David Meisel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 112. Richard Holt, Sport and Society in Modern France (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1981), 42. Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France Between the Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), xi. Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia, 103. As her analysis there and on pages 113–14 reveals, this did not prevent his adoption of some reactionary attitudes, particularly in regard to race. Maurice Boigey, Physiologie générale de l’éducation physique (Paris: Payot, 1919), 249–63. Joan Tumblety, Remaking the Male Body: Masculinity and the Uses of Physical Culture in Inter-War and Vichy France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 68. Maurice Boigey, Physiologie de la culture physique et des sports, quoted in Tumblety, Remaking the Male Body, 66–7. Tumblety, Remaking the Male Body, 60. 183

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22 John Foot, Pedalare! Pedalare! A History of Italian Cycling (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), 5. 23 Jeffrey T. Schnapp, ‘Border Crossings: Italian/German Peregrinations of the Theatre of Totality’, in his Modernitalia, ed. Francesca Santovetti (Oxford; Peter Lang, 2012), 122. 24 Jeffrey T. Schnapp, ‘Mostre’, Modernitalia, 148. 25 Il Gruppo 7, ‘Architecture (II): The Foreigners’, trans. Ellen R. Shapiro, Oppositions 6 (Fall 1978), 100. 26 For Sironi’s work for exhibitions see Jeffrey T. Schnapp, ‘Flash Memories (Sironi on Exhibit)’, in Donatello among the Blackshirts: History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy, eds Claudia Lazzaro and Robert J. Crum (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 223–40, and Emily Braun, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism: Art and Politics under Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 142–57. 27 Braun, Sironi, 154. The reference is to Lissitzky’s Soviet Pavilion at the Pressa exhibition at Cologne in 1928, which Sironi saw as a co-designer of the Italian pavilion. 28 F. T. Marinetti, ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’, Futurism: An Anthology, eds Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi and Laura Wittmann (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 53. 29 F. T. Marinetti, ‘The New Ethical Religion of Speed’, Critical Writings, 255, 256.

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Note: page numbers in italics refer to an illustration. ABC collective 66, 145, 153 ACF see Automobile Club de France advertising and sponsorship advertising art 5 Berlin Olympics 126, 127 boxing and 49, 51, 56 in The Cardiff Team 90, 91, 93, 98, 137 cycle racing and 28 fashion and 72 in Les Footballeurs 104, 106 and modernity 11 press and 19, 21, 25 tennis equipment and 77, 78 Tour de France and 17 Americanism 46, 47, 55 Antliff, Mark 22, 178 Apollinaire, Guillaume and Cravan’s review 51 and Delaunay’s The Cardiff Team 89, 93, 95, 96 ‘Les Fenêtres’ (poem) 95 on Gleizes’s Football Players 97 and Montjoie! 98 on orphism 27, 96, 97 Les Peintres cubistes (The Cubist Painters) 95, 96, 97, 105, 110n.41 Archipenko, Alexander, Boxing (sculpture) 49 Architettura (review) 169, 171 Association of New Architects (ASNOVA) 153, 154, 161 athleticism 64, 72, 102, 119, 125

athletics Americanism 10 Boccioni on 24 in Dynamo Stadium. Sports parade 134–5 in Olympia 134 Parisian sports clubs 87 in photomontage 122 regulation of 1, 2 at Spartakiada 134 women’s participation in 133 Ausdruckstanz (expressive dance) 118, 119–21 L’Auto (newspaper) 19, 20, 23, 29 Automobile Club de France (ACF) 29, 43n.55 avant-garde culture and competition 8 Cravan and 49, 50 ideology and sport 9, 38, 129, 168 and modernism 10, 180 aviation 7, 24, 65, 91, 176, 179 Balla, Giacomo 15, 33 Banfi, Belgiojoso, Peressutti and Rogers, Motor racing room 180, 181 Bauhaus 4, 5, 120, 122, 125, 145–9 Baumeister, Willi, Tennis 77 Beau, Henri 104, 112n.78 Behne, Adolf 11 Eine Stunde Architektur (An Hour of Architecture) 66, 68, 72 Benjamin, Walter, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ 20, 116 195

Index

Bergson, Henri 23, 28, 43n.52 Berta, Giovanni 11, 152, 163 Boccioni, Umberto Dynamism of a Cyclist 15, 18, 24–9 Dynamism of a Footballer 27 ‘Futurist Dynamism and French Painting’ 28 ‘I futuristi plagiati in Francia’ (‘The Futurists Plagiarised in France’) 27 ‘instinctive cubism’ 97, 110n.41 and Italian futurist exhibition 98 Boddy, Kasia 55, 57 Bohn, Willard 49, 109n.18 Boigey, Maurice, Physiologie générale de l’éducation physique 179 Bouin, Jean 177, 179 boxing 46–62 advertising and 5 Americanism 10, 11, 47 Cravan and 46, 47–56 Cravan-Johnson match 56–62 GAN on 122 Grossman on 144 Klucis on 132 Moholy-Nagy and 125 regulation of 1, 2 as spectacle 7, 47 Brandt, Marianne, Sport 122 Braque, Georges boxing 2, 47, 48 colour and 26 cubism 96, 105 Delaunay and 95 French exhibition 22 Rivière and 100 Braun, Emily 180, 181 Brecht, Bertolt 176 ‘Emphasis on Sport’ 5 Breitensträter, Hans 143, 144, 171 Breuer, Marcel, ‘Where Do We Stand?’ 167, 168 Brinkman and van der Vlugt (architecture company) 3, 65, 150 Britain 8, 85, 87, 94, 119, 149, 152 Buffet-Picabia, Gabrielle 51, 55, 56 Büttner, Otto 146, 147, 158 Cagno, Alessandro 31, 32 Caillebotte, Gustave 46, 47 Caillois, Roger 18, 19 Canudo, Ricciotto 43n.48, 97 Carpentier, Georges 47, 49, 58, 69

Carrà, Carlo Boxer 49, 51 Force Centres of a Boxer 49 The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli 137 Patriotic Festival (collage) 24, 32 Casabella (magazine) 166, 167 Cendrars, Blaise 56, 58, 81n.41, 95 Cézanne, Paul 90, 99 classical Greece, influence of 114, 116, 119 Coady, Robert J., ‘American Art’ 57 Cocteau, Jean 11, 78, 99 Le Train Bleu (ballet) 69, 144 collage 7, 21, 24, 49, 122, 132 communism 127, 128, 133, 134, 137, 168 Conover, Roger 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 81n.45 constructivism Berlin Olympics 121, 122, 126, 127 GAN and 49, 122 Meyer on 144, 145 and motor car 37 in Soviet Union 128, 129–30, 132, 134, 152 see also ABC collective Cottington, David 22, 98, 100 Coubertin, Charles de Allegory of Sport 114, 115 Discovery of the Laocoon, Rome 1506 114 Coubertin, Pierre de and English public school sports 3, 86–7, 116, 118 and founding of modern Olympics 11, 115, 116, 121 Olympic Review cover 114 and Women’s Olympics 133 Cravan, Arthur (aka Edouard Archinard and Fabian Lloyd) 46–62 background of 49–56 ‘To Be Or Not To Be … American’ (article) 55 poetry 57 review of Salon des Indépendants 51, 57 and The Soil 57 Crupelandt, Charles 20–3, 41n.25, 111n.68 cubism Delaunay and 95–7 emotional 104, 105 Feininger and 17 Gleizes and 97, 98 ‘instinctive’ 97, 110n.41 neo-cubism 106 ‘orphic’ 27, 95–8 Picasso and 49, 91, 96 ‘pure’ 105 Rivière and 99–100

196

Index

salon 20, 22–3, 26–8, 95, 96, 99 ‘scientific’ 96, 97 see also Lhote, André; Metzinger, Jean cut-off device 26, 93 cycling 15–28, 29 and commercialism 21 expense of 16, 17 France and 6, 8, 17, 19–21, 23–4, 29 Italy and 6, 24, 25, 180 and working class 20 Dada 46, 49, 50, 52, 58, 61 Dauncy, Hugh and Hare, Geoff 17, 21 Deçoin, Henry, ‘Good Sportsman – Good Soldier’ (essay) 102, 103 Delaunay, Robert aviation works 24 The Cardiff Team 11, 21, 27, 85, 89, 90–7, 98, 106, 137 cubism 15, 104 ‘fairground modernity’ 7, 22 photographic basis 22, 90, 101 Rivière on 100 ‘simultaneism’ 95 de Stijl 37, 66, 161 Dine, Philip 86, 88, 89, 102 Discobolus 116, 125 Dynamo stadium 134–8 Edelman, Robert 9, 132, 137 Ehrenburg, Ilya, 6 Tales with Easy Endings (book) 153, 154, 160 Eiffel Tower 11, 91, 107, 114 Elias, Norbert 58, 61, 137 England boxing 49, 52 public schools 3, 86–7, 116, 118 rugby 3, 85, 86 soccer 85, 86 tennis 63, 64 vorticism 47 L’Esprit Nouveau (magazine) 34, 35, 46, 62–3, 65, 72, 77, 176–80 Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution 180, 181 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, Paris 11, 153 expressionism 15, 96, 119 Faber, François 23, 25 Fagnoni, Raffaello 11, 167 ‘fairground modernity’ 7, 22, 25

fascism Berta 11, 152, 163 fascist aesthetic 116–19 France 178 Italy 6, 126, 127, 152, 180 Germany 6, 116–21 Marinetti and 178, 179 photomontage 180 Winter and 179 Feininger, Lyonel Balance 17, 18 The Bicycle Race 15, 17, 27 cut-off device 26 cycling 2, 29 The Velocipedists 16, 42n.42, 88 Feininger, T. Lux, Sport at the Bauhaus (photo) 147, 148, 149, 157, 158 Fergonzi, Flavio 24, 26, 27 First World War 7, 9, 10, 11, 37, 89, 101–7 Fivé, Gustave 24 ‘Sports’ (poem) 32 France aviation 24 Belle Epoque spirit 15, 17, 88 and boxing 47, 49, 52, 61 cycling 6, 8, 17, 19–21, 23–4, 29 fascism 178 industrialisation 19 motor racing 6, 8, 29 Olympic Games as model 114, 116, 119 role of sport 3 rugby 85–107 soccer 85, 86, 103–5 tennis 63, 69–70, 72, 73, 79, 143 Franco-Prussian war 8, 11 futurism and Berta stadium 166 and the crowd 137 and cycling 20 and fascism 167 male body and 9 and the motor car 29, 34, 40, 181 orphic cubism and 96–8 Parisian exhibition of 26, 50 representation of motion 20, 24–9 see also Balla, Giacomo; Boccioni, Umberto; Carra, Carlo; Marinetti, F. T. G (journal) 37, 38, 39 Gabo, Naum, Martin, Leslie and Nicholson, Ben, eds., Circle: An International Survey of Constructive Art 3 Gaboriau, Philippe 16, 19

197

Index

GAN (Göstra Adrian-Nilsson) 49, 122 Garnier, Tony Cité Industrielle project 150 Stade Gerland 151 Germany and Americanism 55 Berlin Olympic Games 1936 116, 120, 121, 126, 127, 169, 181 boxing 47, 49 constructivism 121 expressionism 96 fascism 6, 116–21 Gondinet on 102 Moholy-Nagy on 126 motor racing 6, 29, 34, 37–8 nationalism 126 tennis 77 see also Feininger, Lyonel; Riefenstahl, Leni, Olympia Giedion, Sigfried 11, 78 Befreites Wohnen (Liberated Living) 70–2 Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferro-Concrete (book) 150, 151 Giro d’Italia 6, 24, 25 Gleizes, Albert cubism 22, 96, 104, 105 ‘Cubism and Tradition’ (essay) 97, 98 A la Cuisine 98 Les Baigneuses 98 The Football Players 21, 27, 85, 97, 98, 137 Les Ponts de Paris (Passy) 98 Rivière on 100 Goebbels, Josef 119, 120 Golan, Romy 107, 178 Goncharova, Natalia, The Cyclist 15, 26 Gounot, André 9, 128, 134 Graeff, Werner 10, 37–40, 45n.98 Green, Christopher 105, 106 Griffin, Roger 9, 178 Gris, Juan 96, 105 Gropius, Walter 5, 66, 143, 145, 147, 149 Gruppo 7 152, 167, 180 Guttmann, Allen 8, 87, 116, 120 Sports and American Art 10 gymnastics 118, 120–3, 125, 128, 130, 143, 149, 177–8 Helsinki, Olympic stadium 169, 170 Hitler, Adolf 116, 118–20 Holt, Richard 63, 87, 106 Sport and Society in Modern France 6 Hourcade, Olivier 23, 99

ideology and sport 6, 8–9, 107, 150 impressionism 26, 97, 98 industrialisation 6, 28, 114, 116, 122, 129, 152, 167 International Olympic Committee (IOC) 118, 120, 121, 127 International Red Stadium, Moscow 6, 11, 152–4, 161–2, 171 internationalism 46, 64, 94, 98, 127, 134, 152 Italian Corporation of Spectacle 180 Italy cycling 6, 24, 25, 180 fascism 6, 126, 127, 152, 180 industrialisation 3, 6 motor racing 29–33, 37 National Exhibition of Sport 1935 6 popularity of sport 2 rationalism 11, 166, 167, 168 renaissance 98 stadiums 162, 163–9, 171 see also futurism Jäntti, Toivo 169, 170 Johnson, Jack 7, 10, 49, 51–2, 53, 55–62 Ma vie et mes combats (autobiography) 52 Kandinsky, Wassily 93, 120, 149 Khan-Magomedov, Selim O. 153 Kiaer, Christina 129, 141n.59 Klucis, Gustav 6, 49, 121, 129, 130–4, 162 Komsomol (Communist Union of Youth) 133 Korzhev, Mikhail 156, 161 Krauss, Rosalind 148, 149 Kühnst, Peter, Sports: A Cultural History in the Mirror of Art 8 Kulagina, Valentina 130, 132 Laban, Rudolf von 121, 143 ‘The Spring Wind and the New Joy’ (dance) 120 Ladovsky, Nikolai 6, 150, 152–4, 161 Lapize, Octave 20, 21 Laurencin, Marie 22, 72, 96, 97 Laver, James 72, 75 Le Bon, Gustav, The Psychology of Crowds 137 Le Corbusier ASNOVA 153 The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning 46, 62–6, 69–70 The Decorative Art of Today 46, 62, 70, 77–8 and L’Esprit Nouveau 34, 35

198

Index

and fascism 178 on hierarchy in art 77 ‘In Search of a Standard’ (montage) 36, 37 motor car design 36–8 and Ozenfant 72 participation in sport 2 and rationalism 167, 180 stadium design 150, 176 tennis 11, 46, 62–6, 69–70, 77 Toward an Architecture 35–6, 62, 69 Urbanisme 11 window display 76, 77 Léger, Fernand 28, 76, 77, 105, 106, 107 Lenglen, Suzanne 10–11, 69–70, 72, 73, 79, 143, 144 Lenzi, Luigi 169, 171 Lewis, Wyndham 49, 137 Lhote, André cubism 100, 106 First World War painting 11, 85, 98, 99 Football 106, 107 Les Footballeurs 104, 105, 106 medical discharge 103 Rivière on 100 Rugby 100–1, 103, 104, 106 ‘Totalisme’ 99, 101 ‘The Two Cubisms’ (essay) 104–5 Lindegren, Yrjö 169, 170 Lissitzky, El 153–62 American cityscapes 158–61 ‘Architecture of the Steel and Reinforced-Concrete Frame’ (article) 161 Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge 160 constructivism 121 Footballer 156, 157, 160 fotopis’ (photomontage) 156 G (review) 37 ‘Proun’ 153, 154–6, 160 Proun 1A The Bridge I 155 Record 159 Record (Runner) 156–8, 160–1 Runner in the City 158 Self-Portrait (Constructor) 156 stadium design 6, 11, 150, 161, 162 superimposed images 158 Wolkenbügel proposal 161 yacht club design 153–6, 161 Loy, Mina 49, 57 Lubar, Robert S. 93, 94 Lucerne Sports International (LSI) 127, 128, 132

Mach, Ernst 33 Photograph showing a speeding bullet 35 Mackenzie, Michael 118–21 Maintenant (journal) 49–51, 55, 57–8 Malevich, Kazimir 156, 161 Suprematism. Painterly Realism of a Footballer. Colour Masses in Four Dimensions 154 Mandell, Richard D. 4, 8 Sport: A Cultural History 6 Manet, Edouard 26, 122, 137 Marc, Franz 90, 93 Marinetti, F. T. ‘To the Automobile’ (later ‘To My Pegasus’) (poem) 31 and boxing 47 ‘Death at the Wheel’ 31 ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’ 30, 32, 33, 34 motor car design 180, 181 ‘The New Ethical Religion of Speed’ 1, 24, 28, 32–3, 177, 178 on sports at music hall 7 on sporting records 4 Martin, Simon 168, 169 masculinity 3, 9, 66, 70, 77, 88, 100, 179 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, ‘Comrades, Discuss Red Sport!’ (poem) 129 Mendelsohn, Erich, Amerika (book) 158 Metzinger, Jean cubism 96, 97, 105 At the Cycle-Race Track 15, 18, 19–29, 98, 137 cycling 2, 15, 16, 17 nationalism 98 Meyer, Hannes ABC group 153 Bauhaus director 5, 146–7 Co-Op room design 66 ‘The New World’ (essay) 143–5, 149, 169, 171 Michelucci, Giovanni 167, 168 Moholy-Nagy, László constructivism 121 Dream of Boarding School Girls 123 Dynamic of the Metropolis manuscript 125 Kinetic Constructive System 122 Light Prop for an Electric Stage (Space-Light Modulator) 122 From Material to Architecture (later The New Vision) 122–5, 126, 149 Militarism 122 Painting, Film, Photography 120, 125 199

Index

Sport Makes Appetite 122–3 Vision in Motion 122 Montjoie! (journal) 43n.48, 97, 98 Moser, Joann 27, 41n.17 motor racing 29–40 constructivism 37 Coupe de la Vitesse (Speed Cup) 32 France and 6, 8, 29 purism 34 sponsorship 3 Munari, Bruno, Berlin Olympics (poster) 126, 127 music hall 4, 7, 47, 176 Mussolini, Benito 6, 12, 127, 163, 168, 171, 180 Nash, Paul 66 Come Out to Live (poster) 67 National Exhibition of Sport, Milan 6, 180, 181, 182 Nazism (National Socialism) 11, 118, 119–21, 125, 126, 180 Nervi, Pier Luigi 11, 150, 152, 163–6 newspapers athletics 123 boxing 7, 61 cycling races 17, 19–25, 28 tennis 69, 72 women’s sport 9 Nietzsche, Friedrich 177, 178 Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF) 4, 99–100, 104 Nurmi, Paavo 143, 144 Olivier, Fernande 46, 47 Olympic games 114–30 Amsterdam 1928 133, 163 Antwerp 1920 144 Berlin 1936 11, 116, 120, 121, 126, 127, 169, 181 classical Greece 121 constructivism 121, 122–7, 128–30 de Coubertin and 7, 11 establishment of 86 Helsinki 1952 170 Paris 1900 149 Paris 1924 144 revival of 114, 115, 116, 149 women and 9, 133 O’Mahony, Mike 69, 119, 128, 130, 137 Ozenfant, Amédée antifascism 178 L’Esprit Nouveau 62, 72, 79, 176

Foundations of Modern Art 76 on motor racing 37, 40 purism 34 tennis 78 Ozenfant, Amédée and Le Corbusier, La Peinture Moderne (Modern Painting) 64 Pagano, Giuseppe 166, 167, 168 Palucca, Gret 120, 143, 146, 149 Paris–Roubaix cycle race 19–24 Patou, Jean 11, 69, 72 photography architecture 161, 163–7 athletics 123, 124, 130, 133, 134, 156, 158–60 Bauhaus 147 boxing 46, 47, 49, 57–8 and The Cardiff Team 11, 22, 90, 91, 93, 101 cycling 25, 111n.68 L’Esprit Nouveau 35–6 objectivity of 25 purism 64–66 Soviet Union 6 and sporting fame 4 staging of 41n.25 tennis 62–4, 69, 72, 76, 77 photomontage constructivist 122, 125, 126, 129, 130, 132, 133, 134 fascist 180 Lissitzky and 153, 156 and motor car 35 Picabia, Francis 49, 52, 96 Picasso, Pablo The Aficionado 137 ballet curtain 69 The Boxer 49 and boxing 46, 47 collage 7 cubism 26, 27, 91, 96 exhibitions 22 Lhote and 101 on realism 25 The Scallop Shell (Notre Avenir est dans l’Air) 24 Still-Life with Chair Caning 21 pictorialism 118, 125, 180 Poggi, Christine 28, 33 propaganda 6, 104, 118, 160 purism 34, 64–6, 72, 77–9 race 61, 119, 144 Racing Club de Paris 63, 87, 88, 102, 103 200

Index

Rationalism (architectural style) 6, 7, 11, 152–3, 166–9, 171, 180 Raynal, Maurice 77, 95, 179 realism 25, 161 Red Sport International (RSI) 121, 128, 129, 130, 133 regulation of sport 1, 2, 4 Renaissance 8, 98, 114 Richter, Hans 1, 37, 56 Riefenstahl, Leni Olympia (film) 116–21, 125–6, 132, 134, 180, 181 Triumph of the Will 119 Rivera, Diego 99 Allegory of California (mural) 72 Rivière, Jacques 4, 99–100 Roberts, William, Boxers 49, 50 Rodchenko, Aleksandr 133–8 Column of ‘Dynamo’ Sport Society. Members moving towards Red Square 134 constructivism 121 Dynamo Stadium. Grandstand 135, 136, 137 Dynamo Stadium. Sports parade 134, 135, 136 The New Moscow (unrealised project) 134 propaganda photography 6 Rodchenko, Aleksandr and Stepanova, Varvara, ‘Programme of the First Working Group of Constructivists’ 129 Rohde, Werner, The Footballer 122 Rose, Hajo, High-Jumper in front of Prellerhaus 147, 148, 157, 158 Rousseau, Henri 11, 90 The Football Players 85, 86, 87, 88–9 Rousseau, Pascal 90, 93 RSI see Red Sport International rugby amateurism 86, 93 elitism 11, 104 and First World War 11, 98–107 French 3, 4, 11, 87, 88–107 history of 2, 3, 85–7 Olympic Review illustration 114 Russolo, Luigi The Crowd 137 Dynamism of an Automobile 33, 34 Revolt 33 Saint-Cyr, Charles de 102, 103, 104 Salon d’Automne 26, 49, 106 Salon des Indépendants 22, 27, 51, 57, 89, 90, 95 Sanborn, Robert Alden 47, 57

Santa Maria Novello railway station, Florence 166 Schawinsky, Xanti, 1934 Year XII of the Fascist Era (poster) 127 Schmid, Sonya and Weddigen, Erasmus 20, 41n.17 Schnapp, Jeffrey T. 41n.29, 180 Segonzac, André Dunoyer de, Boxers 49 Severini, Gino 16, 27, 96, 97, 99, 105 Sidelnikov, Nikolai 121 The Time, the Energy, the Will (photomontage) 134 ‘simultaneism’ 95, 97 Sironi, Mario 6, 180, 182 soccer and class 66, 86 clothing 129–30 and ideology 9 French 85, 86, 103–5 industrial origins 2–4 popularity of 6, 134 stadiums 149–50, 152, 153, 154, 169 Turnen clubs 120, 121 Soil, The (journal) 11, 47, 49, 50, 51, 53, 55–61 Sontag, Susan, ‘Fascinating Fascism’ 117, 118 Soviet Union constructivism 121, 128, 129–38 fizkultura 9, 11, 128, 130, 132, 133, 137 propaganda 6 sport and citizenship 162 women and sport 9, 132, 133 see also International Red Stadium; El Lissitzky; Red Sport International (RSI) Spartakiada, Moscow 6, 11, 129, 130–4, 135 spectacle, sport as 7, 9, 19, 47, 56, 77, 93 sporting crowds, representation of 21, 23, 69, 135, 137 sports and collective feeling 143–5 sports clothing 69–77, 129–30 Stade Français, Paris 63, 87, 93, 94, 98, 102, 150 Stade Gerland, Lyon 150, 151 Stadio Communale Giovanni Berta, Florence 11, 152, 162, 163–7, 169 Stadio dei Marmi (Stadium of Marbles), Rome 163, 167 Stadio Littoriale, Bologna 163, 167 Stadio Mussolini, Turin 12, 166, 167, 169, 171

201

Index

importation of sport 10 tennis 46, 70, 72, 73 USFSA (Union des Sociétés Françaises des Sports Athlétiques) 86, 87–8, 94, 101, 102, 105, 106

stadiums 143–71 and art 5, 11, 12, 57, 144 classical additions 119 development of modernist 149–52, 176 fascist Italy 162, 163–71, 180 Soviet Union 152, 153–62, 180 Stam, Mart 65, 150, 153 Stepanova, Varvara 7, 129–30, 132 ‘Present-Day Dress – Production Clothing’ (article) 129–30 Tatlin, Vladimir, Monument for the Third International 122, 161 Tauffer, Jiri, The Third Intercollegiate Games, Prague 122 Taylorism 4, 33 Teige, Karel 150, 153 Telingater, Solomon 121, 162 Ten Posters of Exercise and Sports (photomontage) 134 Tendences Nouvelles,Les (journal) 17, 27 tennis 46, 62–79 amateurism 63 clothing 69–77 elitism 63–4, 65–6, 70 and modernist architecture 11, 65, 66–79 purism 64–6 transatlantic 10 women and 9, 63–4 Terragni, Giuseppe 6, 180 Terret, Thierry 94, 106 Tour de France 6, 17, 19–21, 23–4, 29 TSV (Turn-und Sport Verein) (Turn and Sports Clubs) 118, 120, 121 Tumblety, Joan 179 Tupitsyn, Margarita 158, 160 Turkus 161, 162 ‘Tuscan Group’ 166, 167, 168 Tzara, Tristan 49, 58, 62, 88, 90 United States boxing 49–62 car design 38

van Doesburg, Theo 1, 37, 66, 161, 162 Varnedoe, Kirk and Gopnik, Adam 7, 22, 25 Vertov, Dziga 126 Man with a Movie Camera 134 Vie au Grand Air,La (periodical) 21, 90, 91, 101–2, 103, 179 VKhUTEMAS (Higher State Artistic and Technical Workshops) 6, 152, 153–4, 161 vorticism 47, 49 war, competitive sport as preparation for 11, 101–4, 179 Weber, Eugen 15, 16, 20, 24 Wigley, Mark 66, 70, 72 Wigman, Mary 120, 121 Williams, William Carlos, ‘The Crowd at the Ball Game’ 137 Wills, Helen 46, 70, 72, 73 Wils, Jan 150, 163 Wimbledon tennis championships 2, 63, 69, 70, 144 Winter, Pierre 176–80 ‘Actualités–Sports’ (Sports News) 178, 179 ‘The New Body’ 177 women and sport 9 basketball 130 flappers 69, 72, 79 gender equality 132, 133, 143 ‘masculinization’ of 143 in Sports Makes Appetite 122, 123 tennis 11, 62, 63–4, 69–76, 144 World’s Fairs 115, 116 Young Women’s Christian Association 72, 74

202

1  Lyonel Feininger, The Bicycle Race, 1912

2  Jean Metzinger, At the Cycle-Race Track, 1912

3  Umberto Boccioni, Dynamism of a Cyclist, 1913

4  Henri Rousseau, The Football Players, 1908

5  Robert Delaunay, The Cardiff Team, Third Version, 1912–13

6  Albert Gleizes, The Football Players, 1912–13

7  André Lhote, Rugby, 1917

8  Varvara Stepanova, Designs for sports clothing, 1923

9  Gustav Klucis, Contact sheet of designs for nine postcards for the Spartakiada, 1928

10  Gustav Klucis, Design for a postcard for the Spartakiada (Discus thrower), 1928

11  El Lissitzky, Axonometric drawing of the yacht club of the International Red Stadium on the Lenin Hills, 1925

12  El Lissitzky, illustration for 6 Tales with Easy Endings, 1921–22

13  El Lissitzky, Ground plan of International Red Stadium, Lenin Hills, 1925