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Beauty on Field and on Exhibit
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Daniel Moore’s “The Shutout,” a painting of Alabama’s 21-0 victory over L.S.U. in the B.C.S. title game Jan. 9, 2012.
By DANIEL GRANT
Published: July 13, 2013
Art meets athletics at several small sports-themed museums
throughout the country.
Enlarge This Image
Martin Linson, v ia United States Sports
Academy
“Omnipotent Triumph” by Martin Linson,
w hich pays tribute to the Paralympic
athlete, w as displayed at the London
Games.
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“The same key characteristics are
required to become a pro hockey
player or a world-renowned sculptor,”
said Dr. Thomas P. Rosandich, the
founder and chief executive of the
United States Sports Academy in
Daphne, Ala. “Persistence, selfconfidence, tolerance for risk, belief in
your own vision, a standard of
excellence and an appreciation for
your role in the progress of the
community.”
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A sprawling building houses the academy’s administrative
offices and the American Sport Art Museum and Archives,
which has more than 1,500 paintings, prints and sculptures
representing almost every sport. But few of the 1,200
students ever see the artwork. The academy offers online-
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Cristóbal Gabarrón, v ia United States Sports
Academy
Cristóbal Gabarrón’s mural “A Tribute
to Human Spirit” celebrates Jackie
Robinson’s breaking baseball’s color
barrier.
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Some of the museum’s artists specialize in sports subjects;
others, like Norman Rockwell and Andy Warhol, are well
known in the larger art world. On the grounds, welded
metal sculptures by Bruce Larsen of Fairhope, Ala., portray
a sprinter, a gymnast, a weight lifter and a basketball
player. The exterior of the building bears a 27-foot-tall
baseball-themed mural titled “A Tribute to the Human
Spirit” by the Spanish artist Cristóbal Gabarrón. Inside,
galleries have thematic or single-artist exhibits like the
permanent collection of painted images from the 1972
Munich Olympics by LeRoy Neiman.
For Rosandich, art is not just decoration, and sportsthemed art is not merely memorabilia for fans. It is his
mission to connect the two areas of human achievement.
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“The ancient Olympics honored both art and sport,” he
said, “and ancient Greek art more often than not portrayed
athletes. We are just carrying on that tradition.”
The American Sport Art Museum and Archives is not the
only place that does so, but few others do.
Bruce Larsen, v ia United States Sports
Academy
“Many people are intimidated by art, thinking it’s
something they won’t understand,” said Elizabeth Varner,
the executive director of the National Art Museum of Sport.
“But we get a lot of sports fans coming in, and they become
intrigued by how an artist interprets sports.”
“Borzov the Sprinter,” honoring the
Soviet sprinter Valery Borzov, w as
made from scrap metal by Bruce
Larsen.
The museum, which is expected to relocate from Indianapolis soon, has more than 1,000
artworks depicting 40 sports. Mina Papatheodorou-Valyraki’s expressionistic painting of a
Formula One Ferrari, Charles Fazzino’s mixed-media pop art view of Super Bowl XLVI
and Rhoda Sherbell’s bronze statue of Y ankees Manager Casey Stengel are among the
highlights.
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The National Sporting Library and Museum in Middleburg, Va., is more specialized. It
focuses on equestrian, fishing and field sports like polo, hunting and shooting.
The museum, in fox-hunting country 40 miles from Washington, draws 10,000 visitors
annually to examine its 12,000-volume library of sporting books and 300-work collection
of paintings and sculptures. Among the artists in the collection are Alfred James
Munnings, a British painter of horses and outspoken enemy of Modernism in art, and
Edward Troye, a Swiss-born painter of American thoroughbreds.
“Some people come in while on a fox hunt,” Claudia Pfeiffer, the museum’s curator, said.
“They walk in with their boots and breeches on.”
These relatively small museums have little to no budgets for acquisitions, their collections
are donated by collectors or the artists, and they are rarely crowded. Far better attended
are the halls of fame of various sports, but only some of them have much original art.
Perhaps the most notable art collection is at the International Tennis Hall of Fame and
Museum in Newport, R.I., which has a 1979 Warhol screen print of Chris Evert, a circa
1930 drawing of Bill Tilden by James Montgomery Flagg, a 1924 etching of Helen Wills by
Childe Hassam, and a 1538 oil-on-board painting of a palace tennis court by the Flemish
artist Lucas Gassel.
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The Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y ., has a collection of more than 1,500
works, including pieces by Neiman, Rockwell and Warhol, but no more than 30 are
displayed at one time. The Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, has some “limited
edition prints, but not a lot of original art,” said its curator, Jason Aikens. The Indianapolis
Motor Speedway Hall of Fame Museum has 13 Neiman paintings that he was
commissioned to create in 1962, as well as other original artwork, said the director, Ellen
Bireley.
For many American artists in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, athletic events were a
frequent motif. A 1923 prizefight between Jack Dempsey and Luis Firpo is known to us
primarily because of George Bellows’s 1924 oil “Dempsey and Firpo” — in the collection of
the Whitney Museum of American Art — that shows Dempsey being knocked through the
ropes. (Dempsey won the bout).
Thomas Eakins enjoyed painting wrestlers and swimmers, Winslow Homer frequently
portrayed fishermen and hunters, and Fairfield Porter periodically depicted outdoor tennis.
“Sports has been a major genre in American art for most of our history,” said Allen
Guttmann, a retired professor of English and American studies at Amherst College and the
author of the 2011 book “Sports and American Art From Benjamin West to Andy Warhol.”
“Nowadays, very few living artists do sports subjects, in large measure because art dealers
and museum directors think of sports as an unimportant area. They turn up their noses at
it. That’s plain ignorant.”
Y et in San Francisco, the George Krevsky Gallery has offered a popular appreciation of the
art of baseball every spring for 16 years.
Krevsky said “sports as a subject of art is rare these days,” but this exhibition attracts more
visitors to the gallery than any other.
“It brings in people who don’t come in other times, and the response is always
tremendous,” he said.
Daniel Grant is the author of “The Business of Being an Artist.”
A version of this article appeared in print on July 14, 2013, on page SP10 of the New York edition w ith the headline: Beauty
on Field and on Exhibit.
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