Focus on this artwork and analyze the 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.
Albert Gleizes Georges Braque Pablo Picasso Salon des Indépendants