Umberto Boccioni, sport and beauty
I came across this while surfing A. Niven's blog recently. It's a Futurist painting entitled 'Dynamism of a Soccer Player', by Umberto Boccioni.
I don't know much about Futurism. But this painting I find amazing. It's sharp strokes and colliding shapes and shades express the iron-crafted grace and subtlety that anyone who has ever played or watched the game can recognise. A great, real example of this is my favourite video of Xabi Alonso, dictating the tempo of a game at Anfield in 2005.
Alonso paces up, down and across the pitch furiously, sliding into tackles and sprinting to loose balls in the aim of controlling the game's flow. The jutting lines and sharp, piercing metallic fragments of Boccioni's painting do justice to this, painting the howling energy and effort which goes into playing the game. As a whole though, in its weeping, bleeding colours, its violently flowering, bursting sense of shape and the soft, cool streaks of light which run into the centre of the image, Boccioni's piece is a powerful reminder of the beauty of football. This is a beauty that I feel, is best felt in action, and not typed in words. It is a beauty which in the video above, can be seen in Alonso's most intricate, creative use of the football. It is a beauty which runs into liberty: of a human soul exploding into colour for 90 minutes each week, wherever that may be.
But this is also a beauty, and a liberty that runs through every sport. I recently watched a man diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic play badminton for his first time in many a year. Over the past decade, I have been used to watching him sleep on the family couch, or sitting in silence, staring into space, drugged on heavy measures of sedatives. But on the badminton court, this man came to life: leaping to throw a cock-wristed smash over the net, and flinching like a spark to deflect deft drop-shots over the net. Boccioni's Futurist image is a nod to the burning freedom of sport, in its capacity to launch us into a momentary, ecstatic refuge from and through a rain of pain and suffering.
I don't know much about Futurism. But this painting I find amazing. It's sharp strokes and colliding shapes and shades express the iron-crafted grace and subtlety that anyone who has ever played or watched the game can recognise. A great, real example of this is my favourite video of Xabi Alonso, dictating the tempo of a game at Anfield in 2005.
Alonso paces up, down and across the pitch furiously, sliding into tackles and sprinting to loose balls in the aim of controlling the game's flow. The jutting lines and sharp, piercing metallic fragments of Boccioni's painting do justice to this, painting the howling energy and effort which goes into playing the game. As a whole though, in its weeping, bleeding colours, its violently flowering, bursting sense of shape and the soft, cool streaks of light which run into the centre of the image, Boccioni's piece is a powerful reminder of the beauty of football. This is a beauty that I feel, is best felt in action, and not typed in words. It is a beauty which in the video above, can be seen in Alonso's most intricate, creative use of the football. It is a beauty which runs into liberty: of a human soul exploding into colour for 90 minutes each week, wherever that may be.
But this is also a beauty, and a liberty that runs through every sport. I recently watched a man diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic play badminton for his first time in many a year. Over the past decade, I have been used to watching him sleep on the family couch, or sitting in silence, staring into space, drugged on heavy measures of sedatives. But on the badminton court, this man came to life: leaping to throw a cock-wristed smash over the net, and flinching like a spark to deflect deft drop-shots over the net. Boccioni's Futurist image is a nod to the burning freedom of sport, in its capacity to launch us into a momentary, ecstatic refuge from and through a rain of pain and suffering.
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