HomeWhen Painting Captures the Athletic Body: The Case of Fernand Léger

When Painting Captures the Athletic Body: The Case of Fernand Léger

Quand la peinture se saisit du corps sportif : Fernand Léger à l’œuvre

Special Issue of “Sport History Review”

« Sport History Review » - Numéro spécial

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Published on Thursday, January 16, 2025

Abstract

Français English

The general idea behind this special issue for the Sport History Review is to bring together an international team of some thirty renowned researchers within the field of sports history and a team of directors, curators, lecturers, resident experts and public program coordinators, etc., from the Alpes-Maritimes museums (Musée Léger, Musée National Marc Chagall and Chapelle Picasso) specializing in Fernand Léger’s work, in order to produce new, scientific knowledge based on both a thematic approach by sports category and a more cross-disciplinary approach. The major series of works produced by Fernand Léger between 1903 and 1955 constitute the corpus of this collective research project.

Announcement

Français English

Argument

This research project on the representations of bodily, athletic and leisure movement in the work of French painter Fernand Léger is rooted in the idea that the "visual shock" felt in front of an image (poster, photograph, painting, etc.) provokes an emotion that generates the perception and re-invention of the athletic movement, and even the suggestion of its imaginary projection in the spectators’ minds. However, limited research has been conducted on the way painters, whatever their school of thought, have attempted to represent the essence of sport, i.e. movement, a notion we embrace in its broadest sense to include mobility, dynamism, and speed1. A previous study focusing on over a thousand sports-related paintings by French and foreign painters of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries underlined the artists’ almost unanimous desire to depict athletic spectra in motion through luminous, dynamic, and positive visual representations2. A close examination of Fernand Léger's approach to the evocation of bodily movement in the practice of physical exercise, sport and leisure stands as an essential step in pursuing this multidisciplinary research on the representation of bodily movement in painting.

Social Impact

This special issue aims to pursuit three main issues. First, it shows how artistic productions contribute to the social construction of different audiences' views on sport as a major contemporary social and cultural phenomenon. These artworks also play a role in shaping the myths, symbols, representations and social imaginaries that underpin it. Second, through an original approach combining history of the body and physical exercises and art history, it enables new, in-depth reflection on how artists perceive and consider bodily movement, sport and leisure in their paintings and within the context of their time. Finally, at a time when all eyes have been focusing on the Olympic and Paralympic Games and, more generally, on major international sporting events, it is essential to question the dominance of a perspective of sport associated with competition, performance, and meritocracy. In this respect, Fernand Léger's pictorial work allows for timely, critical reconsiderations and redefinitions.

Research Questions

While the first half of the 20th century was marked by the rise of the sport spectacle as a social and media phenomenon in both France and the United States—Fernand Léger's main playgrounds—which athletic bodies did he choose to highlight in his work? What do these choices reveal about the physical practices of the period? The previous study carried out on athletic spectra in over 1,000 Western pictorial works from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries show that immobility is scarcely represented. How can this be explained? Despite the relentless acceleration of industrial civilization and speed during the 20th century, is it possible to ignore the two universal laws of mobility highlighted by sociologist Bruno Latour? Can we ignore today that, on the one hand, to speak of mobility is only the fruit of a ratio between transformation and transportation, and never only the result of the more or less rapid movement of a certain good or person, and that, on the other hand, when the mobility of an element increases, the immobility of infrastructures increases accordingly? Even as an avant-garde painter obsessed with introducing movement into painting, Léger was constantly confronted with the inseparability of those two antagonistic postures (immobility versus mobility). His sports-themed work questions the very vitality of bodily movement as much as its opposite, immobility. The interest of studying pictorial representations of movement lies in the art of challenging the spectator of the time, in the way this delicate process of moving from real movement to its pictorial representation is expressed at a given period. Attempting to apprehend the "suggestive" representations of movement in painting in the 19th and 20th centuries as a sign and symbol of life is undoubtedly an attempt to grasp the mystery of life based on the work of artists, and to plunge deep into the epistemological depths of what makes the emergence of life – the first signs of movement.

A Special Issue based on the Creation of an International Team of Sports and Art Historians

The general idea behind this special issue for the Sport History Review is to bring together an international team of some thirty renowned researchers within the field of sports history and a team of directors, curators, lecturers, resident experts and public program coordinators, etc., from the Alpes-Maritimes museums (Musée Léger, Musée National Marc Chagall and Chapelle Picasso) specializing in Fernand Léger's work, in order to produce new, scientific knowledge based on both a thematic approach by sports category and a more cross-disciplinary approach. The major series of works produced by Fernand Léger between 1903 and 1955 constitute the corpus of this collective research project. Here are a few prospects for potential research objects:

  • Thematic Entry by Type of Physical Activity and Sport
    • Dance and artistic practices
    • Gymnastic exercises
    • Cycling
    • Water sports
    • Boxing
    • Roller skating
    • Circus practices
  • Cross-Cutting Thematic Entry
    • The animated body and the fragmented body
    • Artistic devices and processes to capture body movement
    • American influences on body
    • Decorative artworks for sports facilities
    • Bodily well-being, or the healing power of color
    • Ethnocriticism of the painted work: Fernand Léger as the witness and interpreter of the sport of his time
    • Artistic commitment, political involvement and sporting leisure
    • In the "Land of Circles in Action": are the playful spaces depicted by Fernand Léger heterotopic?

Projected Timetable

Special Issue Scheduled to Be Released in Spring 2026

  • December 2024: Call for Papers released
  • February 15, 2025: Deadline for paper abstracts
  • February 15 to February 28, 2025: Reviewing process
  • Decorative artworks for sports facilities
  • March 1, 2025: Notification of abstracts’ acceptances/rejections
  • August 30, 2025: Submission of papers
  • From November 1 to November 30, 2025: Reviewing process (texts sent to two experts (1st evaluation))
  • November 30, 2025: Notification of papers’ acceptances/rejections (refusal, acceptance, acceptance with minor or major revisions)
  • December 2025-January 2026: Revision process (back-and-forth between authors and experts)
  • February 1, 2026: Submission of final, revised, validated articles for publication

Submission Instructions

We invite the submission abstracts (maximum 500 words) in French or English, outlining the intended topic, to: 

  • christian.vivier@univ-fcomte.fr
  • yann.descamps@univ-fcomte.fr

by February 15, 2025.

Notification of the acceptance of abstracts will be made by March 1, 2025. Full papers must then be submitted by August 30, 2025.

Please note that papers submitted to SHR should be limited to 7,000 and 8,000 words, including notes, and formatted according to SHR guidelines. All submissions will undergo double-blind peer-review and must be revised according to feedback from the reviewers and, where necessary, the comments from Guest Editors. It is expected that the special issue will be published in the 2026 Spring Issue (No. 1) of SHR.

Guest Editors’ Information and Contact

  • Yann Descamps, Université de Franche-Comté (France): yann.descamps@univ-fcomte.fr
  • Julie Guttierez, Musée national Fernand Léger (France): julie.guttierez@culture.gouv.fr
  • Elisabeth Magotteaux, Sorbonne Université (France): magotteaux.elisabeth@gmail.com
  • Christian Vivier, Université de Franche-Comté (France): christian.vivier@univ-fcomte.fr

Please direct any questions or inquiries to Christian Vivier (christian.vivier@univ-fcomte.fr) and Yann Descamps (yann.descamps@univ-fcomte.fr).

Notes

1. Here are a few examples of previous works led on the subject: Le corps en mouvement, cat. Exp. Paris, Petit Palais-Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, 15 mai-7 novembre 2024, Paris, Petit Palais 2024 ; Le corps en mouvement. La danse au musée, cat. Exp. Paris, Musée du Louvre, 6 octobre 2016-3 juillet 2017, Paris, Seuil, 2016 ; Jean-René Gaborit et Cyrille Gouyette, Les élans du corps : le mouvement dans la sculpture, Paris, Musée du Louvre, 2005 ; L’art en mouvement, cat. exp. Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Fondation Maeght, 4 juillet-15 octobre 1992, Paris, Fondation Maeght, 1992.

2. Jean-Yves Guillain and Christian Vivier, « Between Movement and Immobility: Representing the Athletic Gesture in European Painting from the end of the 19th century to the mid-20th century », [Communication], ISHPES Congress 2023, University of Lausanne.

 


Date(s)

  • Saturday, February 15, 2025

Keywords

  • art, peinture, Fernand Léger, représentations, corps, sport, pratiques physiques, mouvement

Contact(s)

  • Christian Vivier
    courriel : christian [dot] vivier [at] univ-fcomte [dot] fr
  • Yann Descamps
    courriel : yann [dot] descamps [at] univ-fcomte [dot] fr

Information source

  • Yann Descamps
    courriel : yann [dot] descamps [at] univ-fcomte [dot] fr

License

CC-BY-4.0 This announcement is licensed under the terms of Creative Commons - Attribution 4.0 International - CC BY 4.0 .

To cite this announcement

Christian Vivier, Elisabeth Magotteaux, Julie Guttierez, Yann Descamps, « When Painting Captures the Athletic Body: The Case of Fernand Léger », Call for papers, Calenda, Published on Thursday, January 16, 2025, https://doi.org/10.58079/133fa

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