Yes, physical exercise can be an art form. At the end of the day, everything can be if only artists decide to. The results of depicting sports in art pieces are quite stunning, as proven by these three prime examples.
The Races at Longchamps, Edouard Manet
1867, exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago
Both Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas immortalized the Longchamps racetrack in their art. The course is located near the Bois de Boulogne, on the banks of the river Seine.
It opened in 1857, 10 years before Manet decided to paint it, and to this day, it is still one of the leading tracks for thoroughbred racing in the world. Manet was a regular visitor and an enthusiast of horse races.
The Races of Longchamps shows the thundering animals just about neck to neck, while raising clouds of dust and racing close to the fence that separates them from the crowd. To represent the speed of the battle for victory, the heads of the spectators are almost entirely blurred.
The Football Players, Henri Rousseau
1908, exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum, in New York
The Football Players portrays the practice of the sport in a way that is simultaneously exquisite and ludicrous. That is precisely Rousseau’s most distinct gift. The artist skips the concerns about how to perfectly pain the hands, the feet, the bent knees or the creasing of the clothes.
The point was to create an exhilarating and joyous scene, quite out of the loop of what actually goes down in sports. The footballers seem to be wearing pajamas and the game they’re playing is much closer to rugby. The inconsistencies are what makes this painting a cherished artwork.
Dynamism of a Cyclist, Umberto Boccioni
1913, exhibited at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, in Venice
It is logical that any image in two dimensions limits the depiction of motion. However, the Futurists didn’t want to conform to that law of optics. If Boccioni decided to paint a cyclist, he had to show them in action.
So, he followed the work of the French photographer Etienne-Jules Marey, whose groundbreaking split-second shots of soldiers running were all recorded on the same image. The past, the present and the future that are experienced within seconds could finally be shown all at once.
Boccioni’s Dynamism of a Cyclist overlaps a series of instants, a technique he has extensively explored in other paintings, most notably Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash.
Many other works have beautifully captured the essence of sports, a source of inspiration that has been and will continue to be present in the realm of the arts.