Les Joueurs de football, also referred to as Football Players, is a 1912–13 painting by the French artist, theorist and writer Albert Gleizes. The work was exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants, Paris, March–May 1913 (no. 1293). September through December 1913 the painting was exhibited at Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon, Berlin (no. 147). The work was featured at Galeries Dalmau in Barcelona, 29 November – 12 December 1916 (no. 31), Gleizes' first one-person show. The work was again exhibited at Galeries Dalmau 16 October – 6 November 1926 (no. 7). Stylistically Gleizes' Football Players exemplifies the principle of mobile perspective laid out in Du "Cubisme", written by himself and French painter Jean Metzinger. Guillaume Apollinaire wrote about Les Joueurs de football in an article titled "Le Salon des indépendants", published in L'Intransigeant, 18 March 1913, and again in "A travers le Salon des indépendants", published in Montjoie!, Numéro Spécial, 18 March 1913.
Les Joueurs de football was left by the artist at Galeries Dalmau in 1916. Titled Jugadors de Futbol, the painting was reproduced in the avant-garde Catalan magazine L'Amic de les arts, November 1926. The caption included the inscription Collection Joseph Dalmau.
It was purchased from the Dalmau family between 1953 and 1955 by Stephen Hahn and (The Sidney Janis Gallery); sold in 1955 to Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller, New York. Subsequently the work was sold to the Marlborough-Gerson gallery, New York, and purchased May 1970 by the National Gallery of Art (NGA), Washington D.C.
Description
Les Joueurs de football is a large oil painting on canvas with dimensions 225.4 x 183 cm (88 3/4 x 72 1/16 in.) signed and dated "Albert Gleizes 1912–13", lower left.
After at least one preliminary sketch, Gleizes began working on this painting in 1912 and finished it before exhibiting the work at the Salon des Indépendants, March 1913.
Moving away from his quasi-monochromatic works of 1910 and 1911, Gleizes employs a wide array of primary colors, grays, earth tones and umbers.
Unlike the preferred subject matter of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque (e.g., still lives or guitar players), Gleizes has depicted a vast scene, combining a sporting event with a semi-urban or industrial landscape in the background.
As the principle subject matter of this work Gleizes chose to represent a group of six or seven rugby football players. The action and contact between the players is palpable. Two of the men are holding on to the player with the ball (blue jersey) as if a tackle is imminent. In contrast to the impending violence of the sport, Gleizes has painted flowers along with some cubic shapes toward the bottom right of the picture. On the bottom left is a man, possibly a fallen player, holding what appears to be a round shaped item in his hand. Spectators are seen toward the upper right, while to the left, in the background, Gleizes has painted a town, a bridge and bellowing clouds or smoke.
The rich juxtaposition of divers elements present within the piece are tied together in a Cubist idiom by an interlocking grid of diagonal lines, facets, intersecting plains and spheres.
Overview
Painted during an ongoing debate over the virtues of Cubism and Futurism, Les Joueurs de football is a prime example of the artists desire to reconcile the problem of representing the subject from different points of view simultaneously, and/or in successive stages of motion (both the physical displacement of an object and the movement of thought). Here, according to art historian Peter Brooke, Gleizes explores the movement of subjects in motion "with the sense of movement that can be excited in the spectator using purely pictorial means". Brooke continues, "The drama can be seen very clearly expressed in Gleizes's painting Les Joueurs de football, in which a very powerful pictorial construction is undermined by the idea of aggressive movement, very rare for Gleizes, conveyed in the frozen gestures of the subject, the football players".
Guillaume Apollinaire writes in Montjoie! on 18 March 1913: With his Joueurs de football, Albert Gleizes taken an enormous step. This is his most varied and most colored canvas. I still see in the upper section some unpleasant and heavy smoke, but the composition is new, divers. Gleizes embarked upon a challenging composition that he masterfully arranged. The subject has returned to the painting and I’m not in the least proud to have predicted the return of what constitutes very foundation of pictorial art. This Élan vital constitutes the subject of Gleizes' canvas.