Overview

The world’s most popular sport, soccer, has long been celebrated as “the beautiful game” for its artistry and aesthetic appeal. Picturing the Beautiful Game: A History of Soccer in Visual Culture and Art is the first collection to examine the rich visual culture of soccer, including the fine arts, design, and mass media. Covering a range of topics related to the game’s imagery, this volume investigates the ways soccer has been promoted, commemorated, and contested in visual terms. Throughout various mediums and formats—including illustrated newspapers, modern posters, and contemporary artworks—soccer has come to represent issues relating to identity, politics, and globalization. As the contributors to this collection suggest, these representations of the game reflect society and soccer’s place in our collective imagination. Perspectives from a range of fields including art history, sociology, sport history, and media studies enrich the volume, affording a multifaceted visual history of the beautiful game.

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9781350435773

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Reviews

From the Victorian era to today, artists working in different lands and different media have sought to represent the drama, dynamism, emotion, and beauty of football. Finally, there is a wide-reaching and incisive study that does justice to this rich history of creative work. Covering topics from Italian avant-garde painting to GIFs of Zlatan's goals, contemporary Ghanaian art to bronze statues of Brian Clough, this is a fascinating collection that brings visual culture into the growing scholarship on world football and introduces football to art history. * Bruce Berglund, Professor of History, Calvin College, USA * Picturing the Beautiful Game is a true pleasure to read. In this thought-provoking volume of essays, soccer is analyzed and illuminated as much more than simply a global athletic phenomenon that fuels passionate fans. It is an aggregate of complex images that inform our understanding of culture at large. The talented writers represented offer scholars, sports lovers, and students an entry point to consider some of the most pressing issues in the visual arts around the nature of representation, gender, and visuality. * David E. Little, Director and Chief Curator, Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, USA, and author of The Sports Show: Athletics as Image and Spectacle (2012) *

Author Information

Daniel Haxall is Professor of Art History at Kutztown University, USA.

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