In the history of visual arts, it’s rare to come across a well-known painting that depicts or offers an interpretation of a sporting encounter. There’s Cézanne’s ‘The Card Players,’ but gambling is as much a sport as numerology is a science. When it comes to portrayals of games like cricket, football or tennis — with their centuries-old heritage and continuing social relevance — art history has almost nothing to offer. An omission so thorough it makes one wonder if it was purposely carried out, as a matter of policy.

There was, however, a time when artists were obliged, for professional reasons, to pay great attention to sports. In Ancient Greece, the only way for artists — particularly sculptors — to learn about the human form was to observe it, quite literally, at play. Bodily postures of running or, say, javelin throwing, were considered more proximate to the aesthetic ideals that classical theory was founded on. But soon enough the rules of the game changed and sports were relegated to the margins of artistic consciousness.

All attempts to reunite the two disciplines have since proved futile. The most striking among such attempts was the decision of the Olympic Games organisers, in 1912, to induct artists in their roster of competitive events: a nod to the Greek idea of putting athleticism and creativity on an equal footing. Not many of us remember this today, but “art competitions” were a regular feature of the Games until 1948 and, absurdly, Olympic medals were awarded to painters, sculptors, writers and musicians alongside sportspersons. Yet the pointlessness of such an endeavour — an Olympic gold in painting — was always evident to most serious artists, who refused to participate in the event, just as they steadfastly refused to use sports as the central theme for their works.

In art history, the handful of genuinely good paintings that do touch upon sports — like Camille Pissarro’s 1897 ‘Match de Cricket à Bedford Park’ (oil on canvas) — are most perfunctory in spirit. Pissarro’s cricket players are white smudges of paint situated far in the distance. The picture is foregrounded by a fence and a couple of lush-green trees obstructing the view. The perspective is that of a passer-by, not a spectator. Besides, for Pissarro, a Frenchman in Bedfordshire, England, cricket must have seemed like a novelty, not a subject that calls for serious artistic engagement.

The 20th-century English painter LS Lowry was more involved in this sense. He was a Manchester City fan and understood the centrality of football to the working-class ethos of his town. In Lowry’s work, football is an antidote to the industrial dreariness of urban English life — it’s a metaphor for spiritual release and regeneration. Since his football players and spectators are on the same social plane, they are often indistinguishable from each other in appearance too. ‘Going to the Match’, one of Lowry’s best works, depicts a crowd of people walking towards the open doors of a football stadium, while the “dark, satanic mills” stand inert in the background, buried in mist.

It’s now well known that European attitudes towards sports were always coloured by a sort of class bias that ran both ways: sports were seen either as an aristocratic divertissement or a plebeian waste of time.

Some thinkers, including Thorstein Veblen, that great explicator and critic of capitalism, issued severe indictments against sports regardless of the class factor involved. In his widely influential ‘The Theory of the Leisure Class’,Veblen wrote of “addiction to sports” as symptomatic of “an arrested development of the man’s moral nature”.

And he wasn’t trying to influence general educated opinion; he was echoing it.

Similar prejudices, born no doubt of snobbery, might have kept many European masters from detecting those strains of the mythic and the tragic that run across every sporting endeavour. But, on balance, there’s still something illogical and perverse about blaming artists for the work they did not do. We must remember that as an artist, you don’t choose your subjects so much as your subjects choose you. So the answer to our query might be simpler than we thought. Most artists didn’t depict any sports in their works because most artists presumably didn’t play any sports all their lives.

George Bellows, though, was a splendid exception. This New York-based painter was an avid basketball and baseball player. But it was his training as a boxer that he most successfully drew upon in his mature work.

Through his many unforgettable canvases, Bellows gives us a ringside view of the American prize-fighting circuit that operated illegally back in the day, strictly behind closed doors.

His best paintings — like ‘Stag at Sharkey’s’ from 1909 — manage to convey the brutality, the dynamism as well as the pathos of a boxing game all at once. In Bellows’s boxing paintings, both his fighters, often locked in a violent embrace, are portrayed as victims: even the man landing the punch understands the pain.

An artist can attain such levels of empathy only by direct experience, whether on the sporting field or off it. But when that experience is missing, the muse, understandably, refuses to play along.

Vineet Gillis a Delhi-based journalist currently working with The Sunday Guardian

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