Embodied Imagescape of Sporting Modernity(2/2)

This book project will explore the images of modern sport in art history, focusing on thedepictions of the sport vogue, changing sportsmanship, and intense corporeal experiences.In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Realist, Impressionist, and Modernistartists saw the popularization of sport and transformation of social structure. They madepaintings, drawings, prints, and posters to explore the visual strategies of representing bodymovement and energy, and put forward multiple interpretations of sporting modernity. Thestudy takes the embodied imagescape as the focal point, as the moving body is frequentlyplaced in the natural landscape and cityscape and inscribed with sensual perceptions in thesporting pictures. This project will concentrate on the embodied imagescapes in the fiveseries of artworks: Honoré Daumier’s bather caricatures, Gustave Courbet’s hunting scenes,Edgar Degas’s racecourse images, Gustave Caillebotte’s and Paul Signac’s boatingwaterscape, the female cyclists in posters. These works carry art historical significance,elicit emotional reactions, and invite ethical reflections. Sport, previously an aristocraticprivilege, became increasingly democratic and commercial in the modernizing process, andsymbolized class status, gender identity, and nationalism. Studying the embodiedimagescape of sporting modernity will illuminate the artistic perspective and the period eyeon the body’s liberation and discipline and the multivalent meanings of sporting aesthetics.