Art Historian Discusses Football and Visual Culture

April 30, 2018

What does football – or American soccer – have to do with art? According to presenter Mike O’Mahony, Ph.D., Professor of Art and Visual Culture at the University of Bristol, UK, this question became crucial in post-World War II England, as art critics faced the problem of how to engage new audiences in British culture. During the lecture, “Match of the Day?: John Berger, David Sylvester and the Football and the Fine Arts Exhibition of 1953,” on Thursday, April 19, 2018, Dr. O’Mahony presented this problem in the context of British art traditions and football culture. The J. Hecht British Studies Endowment sponsored the lecture.

In his lecture, Dr. O’Mahony presented the views of two opposing art critics in mid-century England, both of whom had substantial influence on art appreciation: John Berger and David Sylvester. Mr. Berger felt it was important to bring football and art together, while Mr. Sylvester noted that art critics measure the value of a work based on how it respond to earlier works and football art offers no predecessors for this kind of comparison. Dr. O’Mahony also observed that the football art emerging from this period focuses more on the spectator than on the game, featuring panoramic views of crowds in the British landscape tradition that would be familiar to an art historian’s critical eye.

Dr. O’Mahony’s lecture focused on the post-war period in Britain. He attributed a surge in football spectatorship to desire for diversion from harsh war-time realities like food rationing. Consequently, debates about the cultural value of football and its role in British culture also increased, facilitating awareness of sports and popular culture as equally valuable to “high” culture and the fine arts. Whereas previously a passion for football reflected clearly-demarcated class boundaries, the sociopolitical importance of football spectatorship to bring all classes together emerged in the post-war period. “There was a shift in cultural perception and consumption of football to understand that art and sport are both part of culture and modern identity,” said Dr. O’Mahony.

Events like the Fourteenth Olympiad Sport in Art Exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 1948 and the Festival of Britain in 1951 revealed tensions over how much football was a part of British culture, according to Dr. O’Mahony. They both showed an attempt to engage new audiences for art amongst the working class and consider whether sports and popular culture were comparable to other forms of cultural appreciation.

Dr. O’Mahony's recent research and publications concern representations of sports within art and visual culture. Although his original research interests were in representations of sports in Soviet art, those interests have expanded to the wider international arena. He recently completed a two-year Leverhulme Research Fellowship to study sports representation in visual culture with emphasis on the Olympic Games. Dr. O’Mahony is the author of several books, including Olympic Visions: Images of the Games through History (2012) and Sport in the USSR: Physical Culture--Visual Culture (2006).

"Dr. O'Mahony made a superbly researched, engaging, and persuasive case about the benefits of more frequent communication between the worlds of art and visual culture and the worlds of sport history and sport studies,” said Mauricio Borrero, Ph.D., Associate Professor of History.