Sporting Modernity: Sports, Art, and the Athletic Body in Germany, 1918-1938

During the turbulent years of the Weimar Republic(1918-1933) sports emerged as a popular phenomenon that critics often derided as a degenerate fad. But sports and art institutions as well as avant-garde artists looked more closely at sports' potential to rejuvenate a populace demoralized by World War I and cultivate a more dynamic, harmonious society. This book examines images of sports in the visual arts of Weimar Germany to explore how institutions and artists forged a link between sports and art and gave new visual form to notions about the ideal body. It looks at the 1930 Berlin art exhibition "Sports as Cultural Factor;" sports at the Bauhaus; and investigates the sports pictures of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Anton Räderscheidt, and Willi Baumeister as exemplary case studies. Besides examining Weimar sports culture and its links to art, this study illuminates the complex ways in which artists used the motif of the athletic body to define humans' relation to modernity while addressing issues of industrialization, gender, mind-body dualism, and the promotion of sports. This engaging work will be of particular value to readers interested in modern art, sports, and culture in Germany.