In this artwork, how is the Overview discussed?
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.
L’Oiseau bleu, the large poetic composition by Metzinger is the most important work painted by this much discussed artist. It is difficult to express in a few lines and without prior meditation all the invention, all the marvel [féérie] of this well painted work.We can no longer say, now, that Cubism is obscure [triste], gala rather, grand [noblesse], measure [mesure] and audacity.
Les Joueurs de football is testament to the close association of two artists, Metzinger and Gleizes, and to their shared social, cultural and philosophical conviction that painting represented more than a fleeting glimpse of the world in which they lived, that indeed by showing multiple facets of a subject captured at successive intervals in time simultaneously, a truer more complete image would emerge.
We feared the dogmas and hermetic ideas, destructive acts disguised as new constructions, before they appeared as we knew they would. Rejecting nothing, we sketched out a traditional curve in French painting from Courbet to ourselves as the latest arrivals, persuaded that the new order cannot be created independently of the permanent order. (Albert Gleizes, 1917)
Gleizes' Football Players exemplifies the principle of mobile perspective and simultaneity elaborated upon in the Cubist manifesto Du "Cubisme", written with Jean Metzinger. Football Players exemplifies, too, the general freedom of the artist to interpret the subject matter without producing photograph resemblance or ‘realistic’ portrayal of an object or event. For Metzinger and Gleizes, such a portrayal was simply an arbitrary convention. In the world of experience, things are not static, but in constant motion. Objects are rarely seen from one point of view, and the act of perception is systematically accompanied by a collection of emotions and thoughts. Life is not a 'purely retinal' experience.
Albert Gleizes Cubism Du "Cubisme" Futurism Guillaume Apollinaire Jean Metzinger Élan vital