Pedal-Powered Avant-Gardes: Cycling Paintings in 1912–13

This article was downloaded by: [Vere, Bernard] On: 19 May 2011 Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 937800873] Publisher Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 3741 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK The International Journal of the History of Sport Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713672545 Pedal-Powered Avant-Gardes: Cycling Paintings in 1912-13 Bernard Verea a Sotheby's Institute of Art, London, UK Online publication date: 19 May 2011 To cite this Article Vere, Bernard(2011) 'Pedal-Powered Avant-Gardes: Cycling Paintings in 1912-13', The International Journal of the History of Sport, 28: 8, 1156 — 1173 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/09523367.2011.567769 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09523367.2011.567769 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. The International Journal of the History of Sport Vol. 28, Nos. 8–9, May–June 2011, 1156–1173 Pedal-Powered Avant-Gardes: Cycling Paintings in 1912–13 Bernard Vere* Downloaded By: [Vere, Bernard] At: 17:49 19 May 2011 Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London, UK This essay examines three paintings of sporting cyclists completed within 18 months of one another: the German Expressionist Lyonel Feininger’s The Bicycle Race; the French Cubist Jean Metzinger’s At the Cycle-Race Track; and the Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni’s Dynamism of a Cyclist. Although nearcontemporaneous, the works are notable for their spread across Europe. Professional cycling developed as a distinct facet of modernity. Races were supported by the emerging sporting press in tandem with cycle manufacturers; they were a form of exhibition as much as a contest. But although the subject matter is identical, the paintings are not reducible to one another. Feininger focuses on the uniformity of a group of cyclists. Metzinger’s work is linked to French nationalism. Boccioni painted as a response to rival efforts to depict movement as well as the adoption of sporting themes by Salon Cubism, which threatened Italian Futurism’s identity as a separate movement. Keywords: Lyonel Feininger (1871–1956); Jean Metzinger (1883–1956); Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916); professional cycling; avant-garde art In 1912–13, three famous works by avant-garde artists took cycle racing as their subject. The three works are: The Bicycle Race (1912) by the American-born, German-based Expressionist Lyonel Feininger (Figure 1); At the Cycle-Race Track (1912) by the French Cubist Jean Metzinger (Figure 2); and Dynamism of a Cyclist (1913) by the Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni (Figure 3). A fourth important painting, Natalia Goncharova’s The Cyclist (1913), does not deal with competitive cycling and so is here considered only for its portrayal of the movement of bicycle and rider. The geographic spread, but near-contemporaneity, of the production of these works raises a key set of questions: Why should these artists, working across Europe and with different, often rival, artistic affiliations be drawn to the same subject matter? What was it about professional cycling in the years immediately preceding the Great War that lent itself to being painted? To what extent were these artists aware of, and responding to, each other’s work? Finally, what do the differences between the works tell us about the attitudes of the individual avant-gardes, both generally and with particular regard to sport? One of the odd things about the sudden slew of cycling paintings at this time is that the bicycle was far from new. By 1912, the oldest professional road races dated *Email: b.vere@sothebysinstitute.com ISSN 0952-3367 print/ISSN 1743-9035 online Ó 2011 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/09523367.2011.567769 http://www.informaworld.com Downloaded By: [Vere, Bernard] At: 17:49 19 May 2011 The International Journal of the History of Sport 1157 Figure 1. Lyonel Feininger, The Bicycle Race, 1912. Oil on canvas (80.36100 cm). Source: Collection of Mr and Mrs Paul Mellon, image courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington. ÓDACS, 2011. back over 20 years and other artists such as the Futurist Giacomo Balla and the Cubist Robert Delaunay were now painting the more modern automobiles and aeroplanes respectively. Part of the reason for the cycling paintings might be personal. All three artists shared an enthusiasm for cycling that pre-dates their works. In the case of Boccioni, this took the form of drawings of bicycles submitted to the magazine of the Italian Touring Club from 1907.1 But both Feininger and Metzinger were riders. Feininger owned a racing bicycle as far back as the 1890s, an era in which the bicycle was an expression of the belle époque. As Eugen Weber points out, cycling was ‘a pastime for the rich and idle’.2 Feininger’s bicycle would indeed have been expensive; Weber puts the cost of a machine at about three months’ wages for a schoolteacher. Philippe Gaboriau calls the bicycle the ‘spearhead of upper-class values at the end of the nineteenth century’.3 Feininger himself remembered the aristocratic origins of bicycles in his playful canvas The Velocipedists of 1910 (Figure 4). According to the Futurist painter Gino Severini, Metzinger participated in a track race at the Parc des Princes and Severini recalls that he ‘flaunted an elegance and the manners typical of the Parc des Princes socialite racetrack set’.4 Riding on the track, as opposed to the road, retained elements of the belle époque spirit well into the twentieth century. But Metzinger’s own painting depicts the closing stages of a road race and, in doing so, acknowledges the fundamental shift in the character of cycling between the 1890s and 1910. This Downloaded By: [Vere, Bernard] At: 17:49 19 May 2011 1158 B. Vere Figure 2. Jean Metzinger, At the Cycle-Race Track (Au Ve´lodrome), 1912. Oil and collage on canvas (130.4697.1 cm). Source: Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, NY). ÓADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2011. period saw the price of bicycles reduce dramatically and the emergence of the first professional road races, organised by newspapers to attract mass audiences and increase circulation. Hugh Dauncy and Geoff Hare describe the inaugural Tour de France in 1903 as bringing together ‘in one event three burgeoning social phenomena: modern sport, mass circulation newspapers and modern advertising strategies’.5 The earliest of Feininger’s works connected to the final painting of The Bicycle Race dates from 1908 and is an example of his cartoon illustration, executed the year after his comparatively late turn to oil painting. In Balance (Figure 5) six riders are arranged in roughly the same composition that Feininger would employ four years later (the change of orientation from portrait to landscape eliminates one of the riders). Yet Balance, with its focus on handlebar moustaches and discernible faces, is a work that is at least as connected to cycling’s belle époque as it is to modern sport. In The Bicycle Race, the riders become less individuated, even to the extent that three have caps of the same colour as their jerseys in place of the free-flowing long hair depicted in Balance. The geometric style is partly a result of Feininger’s 1911 trip to Paris, where he became familiar with Cubism. In a letter of March 1913, Feininger Downloaded By: [Vere, Bernard] At: 17:49 19 May 2011 The International Journal of the History of Sport 1159 Figure 3. Umberto Boccioni, Dynamism of a Cyclist (Dinamismo di un ciclista), 1913. Oil on canvas (70695 cm). Source: Gianni Mattioli Collection (on long term loan at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice). wrote that he was trying to portray the ‘rhythm and balance between various objects’, while stressing his distance from Cubism. He even reluctantly proposed the term ‘prism-ism’.6 In 1912, in a piece for the Parisian journal Les Tendences Nouvelles, tellingly illustrated by The Bicycle Race, Feininger set down his view that ‘every picture that deserves the name must be an absolute synthesis of rhythm, form, perspective and colour; and even all that is not good enough if it is not expressive’.7 The synthesis that Feininger seeks is partly a result of the subject matter. The riders seem at one with their machines. Just as importantly, the peloton, or bunch, seems to move as one. Whereas Balance had the riders looking at one another, in the painting the riders collectively seem to constitute a machine composed of triangles, so that even the spaces between the bicycles appear to take on solid form, as in the case of the triangle between the legs of the rider to the rear. It is hard to establish unequivocally that Balance portrays club riders enjoying a day out on their bikes and possibly a competitive, but friendly, race or that The Bicycle Race references the altogether more stringent demands of professional sport, but the changes made between the works suggest that interpretation. There is a powerful story to be told of the social liberation, freedom of movement and enjoyment occasioned by the invention of bicycle, but this is not apparent in any of the three paintings under discussion. If there remains some doubt over whether the riders in The Bicycle Race are professionals, then this is not the case for At the Cycle-Race Track or Dynamism B. Vere Downloaded By: [Vere, Bernard] At: 17:49 19 May 2011 1160 Figure 4. Lyonel Feininger, The Velocipedists. Oil on canvas (96684.5 cm). Source: Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale, Sotheby’s, London, 20 June 2005, Lot 20. Image courtesy of Sotheby’s. ÓDACS, 2011. of a Cyclist. As Roger Caillois argues, for professional cyclists, competition ‘has ceased being a recreation intended as a relaxation from fatigue or a relief from the monotony of oppressive or exhausting work. It is their very work, necessary to their subsistence, a constant and absorbing activity, replete with obstacles and problems.’8 This fusion of professional man and precision machine resulted in two distinct portrayals of the riders: the first, common in the newspaper reports of the races, sees the riders as exemplary workers joined to what Gaboriau calls ‘machines which shatter distance, machines of play linked to speed’;9 the second views them as ‘forçats de la route’ (forced labourers of the road). This term, occasionally used by the riders themselves, was a charge which Gaboriau believes can be traced back at least as far 1161 Downloaded By: [Vere, Bernard] At: 17:49 19 May 2011 The International Journal of the History of Sport Figure 5. Lyonel Feininger, Balance (Bilanz). Caricature in Das Schnauferl, 1908. Source: ÓDACS, 2011. as 1911 and was accentuated by the fact that riders rode not for their country but for commercial concerns. In fact, as Caillois observes, modern sports contests (and he specifically names bicycle races on his list) are ‘intrinsic spectacles . . . dramas whose vicissitudes keep the public breathless, and lead to denouements which exalt some and depress others. The nature of these spectacles remains that of an agôn, but their outward aspect is that of an exhibition.’10 Downloaded By: [Vere, Bernard] At: 17:49 19 May 2011 1162 B. Vere Metzinger’s painting is the only one of the three in which both the race and the location of the spectacle can be firmly established. The hoarding visible between chest and thigh of the rider identifies the race as the one-day classic Paris-Roubaix, and the velodrome location signifies that this is the conclusion of the race in Roubaix. The race, first run in 1896, has become the quintessential one-day bicycle contest and has an exemplary history. Roubaix, now virtually a suburb of Lille, had an independent, successful identity at the turn of the century. By the time Metzinger came to paint At the Cycle-Race Track, it had a population of 125,000 and in 1911 had played host to an international exhibition that had drawn 3,000 exhibitors and 1.6 million visitors. The city’s prosperity depended on its textile industry, so much so that it was known as a ‘French Manchester’ and the ‘city with a thousand chimneys’.11 The race’s approach to the city was similarly industrialised, home to the mining communities that Emile Zola took as the setting for his novel Germinal. In 1895, a velodrome was built on the edge of Roubaix’s municipal Parc Barbieux. The following March, the idea for a race from Paris was put forward by Théodore Vienne and Maurice Perez, two local mill owners and the driving force behind the velodrome’s construction. The pair wrote to Paul Rousseau, director of the newspaper Le Ve´lo, proposing a race finishing with a few laps of the stadium. The race was run for the first time that April. In approaching Le Ve´lo, Vienne and Perez were seeking a combination of publicity and organisational expertise. The press was instrumental in the rise of professional cycling. Le Ve´lo provided finance and organisation for races such as Bordeaux-Paris and Paris-Roubaix with the aim of increasing circulation and selling advertising space to bicycle manufacturers. The tactic was a successful one and Le Ve´lo only ceased publication in 1904 because it had been beaten at its own game when its bitter rival L’Auto initiated the Tour de France in 1903, trebling its circulation during the course of the first race. L’Auto retained its position as the leading cycling publication until the Second World War, when it was succeeded by L’Equipe, whose parent company still control both ParisRoubaix and the Tour de France today. At the same time that cycling was finding a mass following, the riders were no longer gentlemen amateurs. As Weber notes: ‘The champions of the fin de siècle were delivery boys like Terront, bakers’ apprentices like Constant Huret or Edmond Jacquelin, butcher boys like Louis Pothier, chimney sweeps like Maurice Garin, winner of the first Tour de France.’12 Rather like boxing or football, cycling’s heroes were drawn from the ranks of its working-class supporters. The spectators identified with the riders who, in turn, were offered a way out of menial jobs. As Walter Benjamin puts it, in a rarely cited passage of ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’: It is inherent in . . . sports that everybody who witnesses it is somewhat of an expert. This is obvious to anyone listening to a group of newspaper boys leaning on their bicycles and discussing the outcome of a bicycle race. It is not for nothing that newspaper publishers arrange races for their delivery boys. They arouse great interest among the participants, for the victor has an opportunity to rise from delivery boy to professional racer.13 We can also be sure of the identity of the rider represented in At the Cycle-Race Track. In 1912, Paris-Roubaix was won by Charles Crupelandt, riding for the La Française-Diamant team. Entering the velodrome in the company of Gustave Garrigou, Crupelandt won the sprint. The wheel of another bicycle (probably that of Octave Lapize who, a lap down, led out the sprint for Crupelandt) is to the left in the Downloaded By: [Vere, Bernard] At: 17:49 19 May 2011 The International Journal of the History of Sport 1163 final painting and the handlebars of Crupelandt’s bicycle are presented twice, once in negative across his left leg, showing not just a Cubist desire to include time in a painting, but also a Futurist desire to encapsulate the vigorous lateral motion of a sprinting cyclist.14 Period press and publicity photographs confirm the resemblance between Crupelandt and the rider in At the Cycle-Race Track, but the clinching piece of evidence was provided by Sonya Schmid and Erasmus Weddingen in their essay on Metzinger’s work. They reveal that the collaged text ‘PARIS-ROUB’ visible on the hoarding behind the rider actually has a sub-heading, over-painted by the black line forming the base of the hoarding, but still legible in the original. The full headline reads: ‘PARIS-ROUBAIX: CRUPELANDT sur LA FRANCAISE’.15 As well as confirming the identity of the rider, Schmid and Weddingen’s discovery means that a sketch for the final work, owned by the Pompidou Centre, must have been antedated by Metzinger to 1911, so close is it to the composition of the final work.16 As well as the similarities in composition, the rider in the sketch is recognisably the same rider as in the final version rather than the moustachioed, diminutive, curly-haired figure of Lapize, winner of the three previous editions of the race. Schmid and Weddingen conclude from the newspaper clipping that the preparatory material for At the Cycle-Race Track and the painting itself were competed ‘a short time after the race on 7 April’.17 If that is the case, then not only does it come before other works by Salon Cubists that deal with sport, such as Albert Gleizes’s The Football Players (1913) and Robert Delaunay’s first version of The Cardiff Team (a painting of a rugby line-out, started in late 1912), but it also comes at the same time that, or even before, Picasso made his first collage, Still Life with Chair Caning, in May 1912. Metzinger himself was ultimately dismissive of the possibilities of collage beyond mere representation, even though here the collaged element has changed its function from newspaper headline to advertising hoarding.18 But the inclusion of the newspaper clipping seems to reinforce the connection between the newspaper industry and races such as Paris-Roubaix. Dauncy and Hare’s description of cycle races as the conjunction of modern sport, mass circulation newspapers and modern advertising strategies seems pertinent here; Metzinger neatly plays on the connection between the race, advertising and the press by turning the newsprint of the headline ‘Paris-Roubaix’ into an advertisement for the race itself. The advertisement for tyres in the background plays a similar role. At the point of victory, it is not just Crupelandt who has won the race, but superior technology that has given him the opportunity. Cycling was a sport thoroughly imbued by commercialism from its very inception. Crupelandt won, in part, because he was riding for the La Française team, among the best in the peloton and which therefore attracted the best riders, whose victories it then promoted in its press advertising. Although it was Crupelandt’s first victory in Paris-Roubaix (he won again in 1914), he had already amassed three stage victories in the Tour de France. The period between the race itself and its subsequent commercial exploitation is here reduced to a minimum, or even reversed (since the newspaper headline in full actually refers to Crupelandt’s victory). But as there would have been no race in the first place without the newspaper, perhaps ‘exploitation’ is the wrong word here. Bicycle manufacturers, the sporting press and top riders enjoyed a symbiotic relationship. At the Cycle-Race Track, with its newsprint and advertising hoardings, as well as its large crowd of fans packed into the Roubaix velodrome, manages to capture not just a moment of sporting achievement, but the commercial considerations that underpin its very possibility. 1164 B. Vere Given that Robert Delaunay used a newspaper photograph of a rugby line-out as the basis for his ‘Cardiff Team’ works, it is legitimate to speculate that Metzinger’s entire knowledge of Crupelandt’s victory came through newspaper reports. Metzinger surrounds the action with a painted black border, mimicking the framing of photographs in the press and adopts a position in the centre of the velodrome, a location that a photographer would be able to access and would probably favour. Writing of Delaunay’s picture, Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik conclude that: Downloaded By: [Vere, Bernard] At: 17:49 19 May 2011 In sum, the picture posits a coalition among adventurism, athletics, technology, publicity and art. And the whole composite alliance is suffused with the glow of a fairground modernity based on the creation of new thrills, spectacles, or amusements – things produced either for their own sake or in hope of profits, but with no excuse in practicality or necessity.19 Much of that statement also applies to ‘At the Cycle-Race Track’ and the fact that Varnedoe and Gopnik include art itself in that coalition is important. For not only was Paris-Roubaix news in 1912, so too was Metzinger. Unlike Picasso and Braque, who only exhibited at the gallery of their dealer Kahnweiler, Salon Cubism was highly visible, their works having been launched as a group (at least in the public’s imagination), at the previous year’s Salon des Inde´pendants. Here Metzinger had shown work in the famous Room 41 alongside Delaunay, Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger, Henri Le Fauconnier and Marie Laurencin. The exhibition caused a scandal. Press coverage was extensive. Crupelandt’s victory holds a further point of significance in the analysis of ‘At the Cycle-Race Track’. For although the French dominated the race before the First World War, the man nicknamed ‘the Bull of the North’ became the first native Roubaisien to win the competition, a fact that formed the basis of much of the coverage of the race in the local press.20 Crupelandt’s importance to regional identity was such that the final stretch of cobbles before the velodrome in Roubaix is still named after him. Long before Crupelandt won the race, the competition had become vital to the identity of the region. As early as 1898, Victor Breyer, who had testridden the course for Le Ve´lo before the first race, claimed that the Roubaix track could be described ‘without exaggeration as world famous. Its history is intimately bound up with French sport.’21 If Paris-Roubaix was vital to the identity of the region, then that alone cannot be the reason that Metzinger chose to paint it. Metzinger was not from northern France but from Nantes, and, as discussed above, there is no real reason to suppose that he was in the velodrome when Crupelandt won the race. Rather, what seems to have attracted Metzinger was the incorporation of this strong regional identity within an overall French identity. The connection between Salon Cubism – of which Metzinger, along with Gleizes, was the main theorist and leading practitioner – and French nationalism has been made by both Mark Antliff and David Cottington.22 Several changes that Metzinger made between the preparatory works and the final painting serve to emphasise an overarching national identity. The final painting contains a prominent tricolour, not present in the Pompidou sketch, and which is placed in a slightly different location in a second. Additionally, a figure situated in the tribune and wearing a top hat, included in the sketches, a watercolour and a small version in oil, is replaced in the final painting by a figure in French military uniform. Superimposed on the rider’s left cheek is another, rotated tricolour, difficult to spot in reproduction but much more apparent in the painting itself, as it appears at eye level Downloaded By: [Vere, Bernard] At: 17:49 19 May 2011 The International Journal of the History of Sport 1165 and is bounded by the lines that emphasise Crupelandt’s cheekbone. The view through the rider’s face into the crowd reveals ascending bands of blue, white and red. Indeed, the transparency of the face, often accounted for as an attempt to capture the speed of the rider,23 seems better read as an identification between the rider and the crowd, in which Crupelandt, the local working-class rider, is composed of and serves as an emblem for the crowd behind him.24 Allied to this nationalist sentiment, sport was held to play a key part in countering the supposed physical degeneration of France, manifested by defeat in the FrancoPrussian war of 1870. L’Auto specifically positioned the inaugural Tour de France in this way, writing of the event’s contribution to ‘physical regeneration’.25 Sport’s capacity to contribute to the physical and moral welfare of the nation was still being discussed when Metzinger produced this work. In an interview just two months after Crupelandt’s victory, the philosopher Henri Bergson, a key figure for Salon Cubists, stated that: ‘What I like best about sports is the self-confidence it generates. . . . I believe in a renaissance in French morality.’26 Bergson linked youth, sport and what he termed a ‘magnificent French unity’ in ways that echo Metzinger’s painting. If sport could be considered as one way in which the French nation could respond vigorously to 1870, then so too was art. In the same month that the interview with Bergson was published, the critic Olivier Hourcade asked his readers to ‘consider the renewal of chauvinism in France. Our entire country’s reaction against the 1870 defeats is still taking place, it seems to me. And any country’s reaction has a greater influence on the contemporary arts than people seem to realise.’ As part of that influence, Hourcade listed Metzinger among a group of Cubists whose work, he believed, was approaching that ‘real and magnificent result . . . the creation of a ‘‘French’’ and absolutely independent school of painting’.27 If this argument based on the importance of regional identity within French national identity seems incongruous when placed alongside a reading of Metzinger’s painting as a response to a modern and thoroughly commercial innovation such as the Paris-Roubaix cycle race, a response that borrows some of the formal devices – and even the very fabric – of cycling’s presentation in the press, then we should remember that the race itself was at once a mix of commercial venture and regional/ national identity. Indeed, the bicycle on which Crupelandt won the race was the patriotically named La Française. Between 1896, when the first race had been won by the German Josef Fischer, and 1912, the French had dominated Paris-Roubaix winning all but the 1908 edition. Of the nine editions of the Tour de France completed by the time of At the Cycle-Race Track, eight had been won by French riders (the Luxembourger François Faber won in 1909). Cycling was a sport at which the French excelled, running alongside an industry in which they also excelled. It also shared close links to another sport and industry at which the French were excelling – aviation.28 The Farman brothers, famous French pilots, had been professional cyclists before turning to aviation. The emerging industries shared many technologies and both caught the imagination with their combination of man and machine. As with cycling, the exploits of aviators were reported in great detail by the press. Aviation and cycling, as two industries dating from the period after the defeat of 1870, aroused national pride not just among the populace, but also among artists. In 1912, at the same time that Metzinger was working on At the Cycle-Race Track, Picasso’s The Scallop Shell (Notre Avenir est dans l’Air) included a book with a tricolour cover, the title of which, ‘Our Future is in the Air’, alludes to the enthusiasm of the Downloaded By: [Vere, Bernard] At: 17:49 19 May 2011 1166 B. Vere French for aviation. Delaunay and Roger de la Fresnaye also completed works in which French aviation played a prominent role. Metzinger’s work might not have quite the same appeal to glamour as paintings that took aviation as their subject, but with 3.5 million bicycles owned in France before the war, it treated a theme with a much wider resonance in terms of the average French citizen’s personal experience. As Weber points out, in comparison to the new technology of the car and the aeroplane, the role of the bicycle ‘tends to be lost from sight behind more spectacular performances. Yet a careful look at the era’s newspapers indicates that, while thousands thrilled at the excitements of new petrol-powered engines, millions looked on the bike as something to admire and also to acquire’.29 Sport plays a marked, if rather unanalysed, role in Italian Futurism between 1913 and 1916. Even before Umberto Boccioni’s Dynamism of a Cyclist, Futurism’s founder Filippo Tommaso Marinetti praised ‘sport pursued with passion, art and idealism’ and regarded ‘the concept and love of achieving ‘‘records’’’ as among the factors bringing about a new, Futurist sensibility.30 For Marinetti, the bicycle was one of seven types of transport having an effect on the modern psyche. Following Boccioni’s work, Carlo Carrà’s collage Patriotic Festival features the headline ‘SPORTS’ near its centre, clipped from an article by Gustave Five in the Futurist paper Lacerba. Finally, in the manifesto ‘The New Ethical Religion of Speed’, Marinetti declared that ‘sportsmen are the first neophytes of this new religion’ before raising bicycles to the rank of divine objects.31 In comparison to Metzinger’s work, Boccioni’s painting offers little to the viewer to aid identification of either a rider or a location. Flavio Fergonzi believes that it is likely that it was based on an actual race and suggests as a source the Giro d’Italia – Italy’s equivalent to the Tour de France, first raced in 1909, the same year as the founding of Futurism.32 However, in May 1913, when the Giro was in Milan, Boccioni was busy completing sculptures for an exhibition to be held in Paris the next month. When he arrived in the French capital in late June, the first stage of the Tour de France was setting off from Paris. As this was at a time when Boccioni would have had ample opportunity not only to watch the race, but also to consider new themes for his work, the French race seems a more likely source of inspiration, not least as it was staged nearer to the completion of the painting (Fergonzi believes it was painted that September). Unusually for a movement closely bound to Italian nationalism, the rider’s jersey is not that of the Italian champion. Rather it appears to be that of the champion of Luxembourg or the Netherlands, in which case the Luxembourger François Faber (winner of Paris-Roubaix in 1913 and a previous Tour de France victor), seems a likely candidate. However, Faber, riding for the French Peugeot team, was wearing number 9 in the 1913 Tour, rather than 15, which was worn by his teammate, the Belgian Philippe Thys, and the Giro was almost exclusively an Italian affair in 1913.33 But neither the design of the jersey nor the number featured in any of the work’s preparatory sketches, so little can be established. To analyse Dynamism of a Cyclist as if it were a documentary photograph would clearly be inappropriate. Rather, it is worth considering how the conventions of painting as a medium might be deployed to address the subject of sport. For the ways in which a painting represents an event can reveal something about that event that photography cannot convey. Nor should we lose sight of the fact that the newspaper photograph’s claims to objectivity are themselves based on a ‘realist convention’.34 There is a widely recounted story that Picasso was taken to task by a fellow passenger Downloaded By: [Vere, Bernard] At: 17:49 19 May 2011 The International Journal of the History of Sport 1167 on a train for distorting reality. In reply Picasso asked the man what he thought reality looked like. The man produced a photograph of his wife from his wallet. Picasso scrutinised it, turned it in his hand and pronounced ‘She’s very small. And flat’. This is to say that, having noted that newspaper photographs follow specific conventions, it might be instructive to examine what it is that paintings can do that photography – at least newspaper photography in 1912 and 1913 – cannot. For example, the different approaches that painters use to convey a ‘fairground modernity’ differ dramatically from the studio portraits of leading cyclists or staged photographs of them signing in at race control. In the case of photographs of professional cyclists, almost the entire photographic record is thoroughly imbricated in the network of newspaper promotion and cycle manufacturer advertising. This is, of course, extremely valuable. Press photography is a condition of the very existence of the sport of cycling and so such photographs not only provide us with documentary evidence about how cycling looked, but also about the structure of the sport itself. As Varnedoe and Gopnik argue, a painting can provide ‘a coalition among adventurism, athletics, technology, publicity and art. And the whole composite alliance is suffused with the glow of a fairground modernity.’ If this is indeed the case, then the photographic record conveys little of the adventurism or the art. To say that painting can provide something to aid our appreciation of cycling before the Great War that photography cannot, however, may be insufficient. After all, the solutions offered by the painters addressed here differ radically, are even opposed. Of course, Metzinger’s work differs in two important respects from the iconography of the newspaper photograph with which it shares so many formal similarities. Firstly, it deploys colour, a quality inherent to the medium of oil painting (although colour was something that Picasso and Braque had sought to downplay). But secondly, Metzinger attempts to represent movement. Even if I challenge the view that the transparency of the rider is simply an effect of the attempt to depict speed, the repetition of the handlebars cannot be read as anything other than a means of suggesting movement through time. In Boccioni’s case, as Fergonzi notes, the artist himself had stated two years previously that the identity of the cyclist was not of paramount concern. Instead Boccioni wanted to capture what he termed ‘the instinct for speed’: I shall tell you that in painting, for example, a man speeding along on a bicycle we shall try to reproduce the instinct for speed that determines the action, not the visible forward motion of the cyclist. It doesn’t matter to us that the cyclist’s head might touch the edge of the wheel or his body stretch out behind losing itself in vibrations to infinity with an obvious deception of sight, since it is the sensation of the race, not the cyclist that we wish to depict.35 So the solutions that the painters adopt to try to convey movement, or the instinct for speed, differ. Feininger employs a cut-off technique (often used by Manet and the Impressionists), breaking the front wheels of the first two riders at the edge of the canvas to suggest that they are shooting out of the picture; in a charcoal sketch for the work, he draws a frame around his group of cyclists, but this frame is broken by the front wheel of the lead cyclist, as if the movement cannot be contained by the drawing. Metzinger employs a repeated element, a solution also favoured by Natalia Goncharova in The Cyclist, where the rider’s body and machine are shown with three or four distinct outlines to represent the cyclist’s juddering progress along a cobbled street. Italian Futurists, preoccupied by this question of modern movement, often utilised this solution. But, partly perhaps as a result of its wide adoption, this Downloaded By: [Vere, Bernard] At: 17:49 19 May 2011 1168 B. Vere expedient increasingly displeased Boccioni. Dynamism of a Cyclist exemplifies, for Boccioni, a new kind of representation of movement and it does so in critical dialogue with works such as Metzinger’s and Goncharova’s. This is not to suggest that Boccioni cynically adopted a sporting theme (his use of the bicycle theme and Marinetti’s declaration of the importance of sport to Italian Futurism preclude this), but rather that his cycling painting is a move in a wider game being played out among European avant-gardes generally and between Italian Futurism and Salon Cubism in particular. Like Feininger, Boccioni had first become aware of Cubist painting in 1911, after visiting the Salon d’Automne – where Metzinger was showing with his Salon Cubist colleagues – and meeting Picasso. It resulted in an immediate and substantial change in his work. In February 1912 he returned to Paris with his new paintings as part of the First Futurist exhibition. As the movement’s chief writer and theorist of manifestos on painting and sculpture, Boccioni quickly assumed a key role in debates between Cubists and Futurists. A series of studies demonstrates both the increasing abstraction of the rider and the efforts Boccioni went to in order to suggest the effects that the rider had on the atmosphere around him. This in turn, was part of an attempt by Boccioni to distinguish his work from that of the Cubists. It is likely that Boccioni was aware of Feininger’s The Bicycle Race through its reproduction in Les Tendences Nouvelles.36 The exhibition history of Metzinger’s At the Cycle-Race Track is harder to trace, but it is certain that Boccioni had asked for reproductions of the works on sporting themes by Metzinger’s Cubist collaborators – Gleizes’s The Football Players and Delaunay’s The Cardiff Team: Third Representation – following their exhibition at the 1913 Salon des Indépendants.37 Fergonzi believes that it was ‘possible that Boccioni was aware of Metzinger’s At the Cycle-Race Track, either directly or through a photographic reproduction’.38 Boccioni’s next painting strongly suggests that he was indeed aware of Metzinger’s cycling work. Following the completion of Dynamism of a Cyclist he produced the larger Dynamism of a Footballer, which is surely a response to Gleizes’s The Football Players and suggests that Boccioni was indeed aware of At the CycleRace-Track. If this is the case, Dynamism of a Cyclist is a specific response to Metzinger as well as to Salon Cubism generally. Part of Boccioni’s problem was that Metzinger, Gleizes and Delaunay, in taking up themes of modern entertainment, were leaving behind more conservative landscapes and still lifes and beginning to occupy the territory from which the Futurists had launched their initial critiques of Cubism. In Metzinger’s case this was perhaps, as Joann Moser writes, as a direct consequence of Italian Futurism.39 In my opinion, the antedating of the Pompidou’s Metzinger sketch for At the Cycle-Race Track to 1911, a date that suggests a pre-Futurist genesis for the work, was Metzinger’s attempt to avoid the accusation that he was merely jumping on the Italian Futurist bandwagon in the same way that his critics thought that he had plagiarised Picasso’s ideas in order to become a Cubist in the first place.40 Boccioni spent much of 1913 writing press articles to assert the ‘absolute priority’ of Italian Futurism ‘for all dynamic experiments’.41 Severini recalls receiving Boccioni’s ‘fierce letter’ requesting further information on works from the 1913 Inde´pendants and quotes the letter at length: It is necessary that you find out in any case, about the tendency (in my opinion, ephemeral) of Orphism [Guillaume Apollinaire’s term for Delaunay’s art]. This is trickery performed on Futurism that they refuse to admit . . . Try to find any sort of reproductions, newspapers, magazines and photographs. You will be promptly reimbursed. The International Journal of the History of Sport 1169 Downloaded By: [Vere, Bernard] At: 17:49 19 May 2011 Get the opinions of Picasso, Kahnweiler, at the Closerie de Lilas, of Sagot, Canudo, Apollinaire. What do they think of this Orphism, what is being said about it, and do they see that it is influenced by us?42 Boccioni immediately responded to this perceived slight on Futurism with the article ‘The Futurists Plagiarised in France’. Here, as well as attacking critics for denying Futurism the respect he felt it was owed, he laid the groundwork for his attempt to differentiate Cubist and Futurist portrayals of motion: ‘Italian Futurist painting has enriched the object, grasping it in the environment – that is to say, living it in its life: which is motion.’ 43 In the same essay, Boccioni proposes a ‘religious intoxication for the new’ that Marinetti was to pick up on three years later in his essay ‘The New Ethical Religion of Speed’ and, armed with Boccioni’s subsequent paintings of cyclists and footballers, connect to sportsmen.44 In August, the month before Dynamism of a Cyclist was painted, Boccioni published an essay, ‘Futurist Dynamism and French Painting’, on Fernand Léger, which although ostensibly delighted by the supposed spread of Futurist influence, called on both critics and artists to acknowledge the Italian movement’s primacy. The essay also drew Metzinger directly into the case for, as Boccioni gleefully pointed out, the Cubist critic Roger Allard had already expressed ‘a number of doubts about the Futurist dynamism of J. Metzinger’.45 But although Boccioni would have been appreciative of this acknowledgement of the precedence of Futurism, he too was clearly disturbed by the way in which Delaunay and Metzinger’s work brought the distinction between Cubism and Futurism into question. By the autumn Boccioni was developing a new conception of plastic dynamism arising out of his sculptural work based on the combination of the motion of an object (its absolute motion, in Boccioni’s terminology) situated in the environment that surrounds it (its relative motion). He used this conception in order to distance himself from a representation of motion based on repetition of legs, arms and faces, or – thinking of Metzinger’s painting – handlebars. By December Boccioni was propounding ‘an infinite succession of events . . . not to be found in the repetition of legs, arms and faces, as many people have idiotically believed, but [which] is achieved through the intuitive search for the one single form which produces continuity in space.’46 In her discussion of the painting, Poggi describes how ‘Boccioni relies on contrasting colours and varied brushwork to evoke the interpenetration of the figure and the environment as an effect of velocity’ and notes that ‘As the rider/bicycle complex penetrates the surrounding atmosphere . . . it casts swells of wind to either side’.47 Boccioni was obviously happy at this point to take on the Salon Cubists on the sporting themes they had selected. Despite the similarity of the subject, it is that new conception that Boccioni employs in Dynamism of a Cyclist, a painting that is best understood as an effort to engage with the modern subject of sport in a manner that attempts to avoid confusion with the Cubist canvases that preceded it. Cycle racing is one of a handful of sports that were not only codified during the modern period, as most sports were, but produced by it. By this I do not simply make the point that the bicycle, like the motor car, was a modern invention that could be raced. Rather, dependent on industrial capitalism for its product, the sport itself was organised in a new way: The press not only reported on the sporting events but engineered them; the riders did not represent their country or a specific town but a brand, which in itself seemed to underscore the bicycle as a technology of movement not tied to a specific location; and advertising was conceived of not as a supplement to the sport’s existence but integral to its conditions of possibility. In its embrace of modernity, as well as its conjunction of man and machine, it offered an attractive subject matter for the pre-war avant-gardes. Although the attraction that the sport held for all the painters shared 1170 B. Vere some of the same characteristics, the works are not equivalent to one another. Feininger offers the individual as subsumed within a greater whole; Metzinger mobilises the modernity of the sport, its spectacle, but also its domination by the French; Boccioni’s analysis of movement integrates the rider into his surrounding environment. These responses are fluid, overdetermined by the moves that others make in the same field. Much the same way, in fact, that a bicycle race can look from the outside to be an example of perfect harmony but is in reality made up of competitors who enter into shifting alliances in an attempt to outmanoeuvre one another. Note on Contributor Bernard Vere is Lecturer in Modern Art at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London. He received his PhD from the London Consortium (Birkbeck College, Architectural Association, Institute of Contemporary Arts and Tate) in 2006. Downloaded By: [Vere, Bernard] At: 17:49 19 May 2011 Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. Poggi, Inventing Futurism, 73. Weber, France, 195. Gaboriau, ‘The Tour de France and Cycling’s Belle Epoque’, 57. Severini, The Life of a Painter, 94. Dauncy and Hare, ‘The Tour de France’, 8. Feininger, Letter to Alfred Vance Churchill, 13 March 1913, quoted in Hess, Lyonel Feininger, 56. Feininger, Les Tendences Nouvelles, 56 (1912), quoted in Hess, Lyonel Feininger, 55. Caillois, Man, Play and Games, 45. Gaboriau, ‘The Tour de France and Cycling’s Belle Epoque’, 70. Caillois, Man, Play and Games, 22. Agôn is Caillois’s term for any game or sport with a competitive element between participants. For details on Roubaix, see Sergent, ‘19 avril 1896’, 19, and Dehmas, ‘Lire la course’, 77–9. Weber, France, 200. Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, 225. See the account of the 1912 race provided by Sergent, A Century of Paris-Roubaix, n.p. Schmid and Weddingen, ‘Jean Metzinger und die ‘‘Königin der Klassiker’’’, 238. My thanks to Dr Ricarda Vidal for her help in translating parts of this essay from the German. Moser mentions the problems in dating Metzinger’s works from this period, exacerbated because ‘some works may have been backdated by Metzinger himself much later in his career’: Moser, Jean Metzinger in Retrospect, 7. In the case of this particular drawing, Schmid and Weddingen (‘Jean Metzinger und die ‘‘Königin der Klassiker’’’, 235) also find the date unconvincing and point out that the work is signed and dated over part of the paper that has been scratched. Schmid and Weddingen, ‘Jean Metzinger und die ‘‘Königin der Klassiker’’’, 236. In an essay for a Czech journal, Metzinger wrote that: ‘Certain artists are satisfied . . . with gluing onto their canvases cut-outs of signs, stamps, newspaper clippings, etc. What could be more logical? I repeat: these things have no intrinsic artistic value of their own, they are incidental and of little importance’: Metzinger, ‘Kubistická Technika’, 610–11. The newspaper photograph on which Delaunay based his three versions of ‘The Cardiff Team’ (1912–13) is reproduced in Wohl, A Passion for Wings, fig. 243, 188. Varnedoe and Gopnik, High and Low, 248. See Dehmas ‘Lire la course’, 80, n. 28. Sergent, A Century of Paris-Roubaix, reproduces the front page of Le Nord Illustre´ for 15 April 1912, with its photograph of Crupelandt signing at race control following his victory (the photograph is staged for the benefit of the press; Crupelandt looks up at the cameras, rather than down at his pen, in a pose common to a variety of ceremonial signings from peace treaties to wedding registers) and its headline ‘A Roubaisien has won on the Paris-Roubaix cycling course’. Breyer, quoted in Sergent, ‘19 avril 1896’, 20. Antliff, Inventing Bergson, 106–34; Cottington, Cubism in the Shadow of War, 87–122. Downloaded By: [Vere, Bernard] At: 17:49 19 May 2011 The International Journal of the History of Sport 1171 23. See Moser, Jean Metzinger in Retrospect, 43; Mercier, ‘Le Cycliste, 1912’, 194. 24. Schnapp terms ‘emblematic’ portraits in which the face or body of the subject is composed of a multitude of other bodies and writes that the production of such work ‘serves as a vehicle less for the loss of boundaries between individuals than for the triumph of (collective) Form’: Schnapp, ‘Mob Porn’, 5. 25. Vigarello, ‘The Tour de France’, 479. 26. Bergson, quoted in interview by J. Bertaut, ‘Réponse à une enquête sur la jeunesse’, Le Gaulois Litte´raire, 15 June 1912, quoted in Vigarello, ‘The Tour de France’, 472. For a further discussion of this interview, see Antliff, Inventing Bergson, 96 and 211, n. 83. 27. Hourcade, ‘Le mouvement pictoral’, 299, 300. The essay naturally makes no mention of the Spaniard Picasso. As At the Cycle-Race Track had only just been completed and Hourcade had probably not seen it, he also does not make any mention of the influence of Italian Futurism on the work of Metzinger and other Salon Cubists, widely debated by critics from 1913 to the present day and discussed further below. 28. Much of the following information is drawn from Wohl, Passion for Wings. 29. Weber, France, 209. 30. Marinetti, ‘Destruction of Syntax’, 122. 31. Marinetti, ‘The New Ethical Religion of Speed’, 255–6. 32. Fergonzi, The Mattioli Collection, 179. 33. See the ‘Mémoire du Cyclisme’ website, http://www.memoire-du-cyclisme.net, ‘les partants’ entry for 11th Tour de France, 1913. The top ten riders in the 1913 Giro d’Italia were all Italian. 34. I borrow this phrase from Tagg, The Burden of Representation, see especially 95–102. 35. Boccioni, lecture delivered to the Circolo degli Artisti, Rome, 29 May 1911, quoted in Fergonzi, The Mattioli Collection, 180. 36. Fergonzi, The Mattioli Collection, 181. Fergonzi suggests that Boccioni might have seen the painting at the 1912 Berlin Secession, but the work Feininger showed here was The Velocipedists, not The Bicycle Race, which was first exhibited at the 1913 Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon (see the exhibition history for The Velocipedists in Sotheby’s ‘Impressionism and Modern Art Evening Sale, London’, 20 June 2005, lot 20, where The Velocipedists is listed as no. 50 in the catalogue for the 1912 Berlin Secession and also the website of the National Gallery, Washington, DC, where the exhibition history for The Bicycle Race begins with the Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon: see http://www.nga.gov/fcgibin/tinfo_f?object¼66415&detail¼exhibit. 37. Boccioni asked Severini for reproductions in a letter of 13 March 1913. See Fergonzi, The Mattioli Collection, 181 and 189, n. 16. 38. Fergonzi, The Mattioli Collection, 181. 39. Moser, Jean Metzinger in Retrospect, 43. 40. A charge made by Guillaume Apollinaire in two reviews of the 1910 Salon d’Automne. 41. Boccioni, ‘Futurist Dynamism and French Painting’, 109. The original appeared in Lacerba on 1 Aug. 1913. 42. Boccioni, letter to Gino Severini, 13 March 1913, quoted in Severini, The Life of a Painter, 121–2. Kahnweiler and Sagot were dealers, Canudo, like Apollinaire, a critic. 43. Boccioni, ‘I Futuristi plagiati in Francia’, 150. I am extremely grateful to Christopher Adams of the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, London, for his translation of key passages from this essay. 44. Ibid., 151. 45. Boccioni, ‘Futurist Dynamism and French Painting’, 109. See also a further letter of December 1913 to the German periodical Der Sturm attacking Delaunay, quoted in translation in Wohl, A Passion for Wings, 303, n. 98. 46. Boccioni, ‘Plastic Dynamism’, 93. 47. Poggi, Inventing Futurism, 173, 174. References Antliff, M. Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde. Princeton, NJ and Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1993. Benjamin, W. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, ed. H. Arendt, trans. H. Zohn. London: Fontana, 1992, 211–44. Downloaded By: [Vere, Bernard] At: 17:49 19 May 2011 1172 B. Vere Boccioni, U. ‘I Futuristi plagiati in Francia’, in Archivi Del Futurismo, Vol. 1, eds M. Drudi Gambillo and T. Fiori. Rome: Da Luca, 1958, 147–51. Boccioni, U. ‘Futurist Dynamism and French Painting’, in Futurist Manifestos, ed. U. Apollonio, trans. R. Brain, R.W. Flint, J.C. Higgitt and C. Tisdall. Boston, MA: MFA, 2001, 107–10. Boccioni, U. ‘Plastic Dynamism’, in Futurist Manifestos, ed. U. Apollonio, trans. R. Brain, R.W. Flint, J.C. Higgitt and C. Tisdall. Boston, MA: MFA, 2001, 92–95. Caillois, R. Man, Play and Games, trans. M. Barash. Urbana, IL and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Cottington, D. Cubism in the Shadow of War: The Avant-Garde and Politics in Paris, 1905– 1914. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1998. Dauncy, H. and G. Hare. ‘The Tour de France: A Pre-Modern Contest in a Post-Modern Context’. The International Journal of the History of Sport 20, no. 2 (June 2003): ): 1–29. Dehmas, C. ‘Lire la course: l’épreuve pris aux maux’, in 100 Paris-Roubaix; patrimoine d’un sie`cle, ed. S. Fleuriel. Villeneuve d’Ascq [Nord]: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2002, 75–109. Fergonzi, F. The Mattioli Collection: Masterpieces of the Italian Avant-Garde. Milan: Skira, 2003. Gaboriau, P. ‘The Tour de France and Cycling’s Belle Epoque’. The International Journal of the History of Sport 20, no. 2 (June 2003): 57–78. Hess, H. Lyonel Feininger. London: Thames & Hudson, 1961. Hourcade, O. ‘Le mouvement pictoral: Vers une école française de peinture’, in A Cubism Reader, eds. M. Antliff and P. Leighten, trans. J.M. Todd, J. Gaiger, L. Cochrane, P. Zamora and I. Horacek. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008, 297– 302. Marinetti, F.T. ‘Destruction of Syntax – Untrammeled Imagination – Words-in-Freedom’, in F.T. Marinetti: Critical Writings, ed. G. Berghaus, trans. D. Thompson. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006, 120–31. Marinetti, F.T. ‘The New Ethical Religion of Speed’, in F.T. Marinetti: Critical Writings, ed. G. Berghaus, trans. D. Thompson. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006, 253–9. Mercier, I. ‘Le Cycliste, 1912’, in Le Futurisme à Paris. Une avant-garde explosive (exhibition catalogue), ed. D. Ottinger (Centre national d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou, Paris, 15 Oct. 2008–26 Jan. 2009, then touring), 194. Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2008. Metzinger, J. ‘Kubistická Technika’, in A Cubism Reader, eds. M. Antliff and P. Leighten, trans. J.M. Todd, J. Gaiger, L. Cochrane, P. Zamora and I. Horacek. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008, 602–12. Moser, J. Jean Metzinger in Retrospect (exhibition catalogue) (University of Iowa Museum, Iowa City, 31 Aug.–13 Oct. 1985, then touring). Iowa: University of Iowa Museum of Art, 1985. Poggi, C. Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009. Schmid, S. and E. Weddingen. ‘Jean Metzinger und die ‘‘Königin der Klassiker’’ Eine Cyclopädie des Kubismus’. Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch, Bund 59 (1998): 229–258. Schnapp, J.T. ‘Mob Porn’, in Crowds, eds. J.T. Schnapp and M. Tierney. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006, 1–45. Sergent, P. A Century of Paris-Roubaix, trans. Richard Yates. London: Bromley, 1997. Sergent, P. ‘19 avril 1896: la légende est en marche’, in 100 Paris-Roubaix; patrimoine d’un sie`cle, ed. S. Fleuriel. Villeneuve d’Ascq [Nord]: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2002, 19–27. Severini, G. The Life of a Painter: The Autobiography of Gino Severini, trans. J. Franchina. Princeton, NJ and Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1995. Tagg, J. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988. Varnedoe, K. and A. Gopnik. High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture (exhibition catalogue). (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 7 Oct. 1990 –15 Jan. 1991, then touring). New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1990. The International Journal of the History of Sport 1173 Downloaded By: [Vere, Bernard] At: 17:49 19 May 2011 Vigarello, G. ‘The Tour de France’, in Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, vol. 2: Traditions. , under the direction of P. Nora. English language edn. ed. L.D. Kritzman, trans. A. Goldhammer. New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press, 1997, 469–500. Weber, E. France, Fin de Sie`cle. Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1986. Wohl, R. A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1908–1918. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1994.