Picturing the Modern Body: Sports Culture in Nineteenth-Century Western Art

In the context of modernity, sports culture is filled with metaphors of gender, class, and nationality.

 

Historically, the academic world has rarely used sports as a focal point to explore the developmental trajectory of modern art and the characteristics of body imagery. This book focuses on the rich imagery and expressive techniques of sports culture in 19th-century Western art, analyzing the shaping and meaning of the modern body. This period marks a critical phase of transformation for both art and sports, as they both gradually became specialized and commercialized fields in the process of modernization. Visual art concretely reflects the evolving concepts of physical and mental health in modern society, conveying self-identity and metaphors of gender, class, and nationality in sports.

 

The book is divided into five chapters, each focusing on a groundbreaking series or type of work. The main content includes Honoré Daumier’s satirical cartoons of swimming, Gustave Courbet’s hunting paintings, Edgar Degas’s horse racing scenes, Gustave Caillebotte’s boating landscapes, and advertising posters of women riding bicycles. It draws on sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s insights into sports and habitus to argue that the representation of the modern body embodies comedy, violence, loss, peculiarity, and kinetic energy, containing multiple cultural and aesthetic meanings.