The beautiful game: revived art prize gives football its creative due once more | Emma John

Football and the art world have long remained distant but the breadth of entries for this year’s award revivals a healthy revival It may be the Beautiful Game, but in its early decades football was a rare subject for artists. The Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni whirled an athlete’s body into a vortex of movement in his 1913 painting Dynamism of a Soccer Player. You can see one of the earliest fine art depictions of a match – a smoggy, factory-adjactent scene called Any Wintry Afternoon in England – at the Manchester Art Gallery. If 1930s abstraction is more your thing, you can enjoy decoding the geometric shapes in Kazimir Malevich’s Painterly Realism of a Football Player – Color Masses in the 4th Dimension. I’m guessing the small green pea shape is a ball. These, in any case, were exceptions. In 1953 the Football Association launched an art prize, backed by the newly formed Arts Council: the winning works included Going To The Match by LS Lowry, with its crowds flocking to Bolton Wanderers’ then home ground, Burnden Park. An exhibition of the submissions, Football and The Fine Arts, toured the country and the FA secretary, Sir Stanley Rous, said he hoped it would finally break the barrier between those two worlds. Continue reading...