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

Summary

Football and the art world have long remained distant but the breadth of entries for this year’s award reveals 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…

Description from The Guardian.