André Lhote’s Les Rugbymen, a Cubist vision of modern sport

The second edition of the modern Olympic Games took place in Paris in 1900. After missing out on the inaugural edition in Athens four years earlier, rugby has now been included for the first time. It may come as a surprise to some to learn that France won the gold medal.

Rugby finally originated in England in the 19th century. According to popular belief, this happened when William Webb Ellis, a mischievous rugby school student, picked up the ball and ran with it during a football (also called soccer) game in 1823.

The story is probably apocryphal. However, it is generally accepted that rugby as we know it originated around this time at the school from which it takes its name. The game was soon being played actively at other English private schools as well.

How it became so popular in France so quickly is explored below – popular not only with players and fans but also with artists. Rugby became a favorite subject for Cubists in the second decade of the 20th century, and one of their paintings, Les rugby men by André Lhote, will be available in the Art Impressionniste & Moderne sale at Christie’s in Paris on April 5, 2023.

In 1871 France had suffered the shame of a convincing defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. This ended with the Imperial German Army’s victory parade through the streets of Paris.

The road to restoring national glory seemed long. For the educator Pierre de Coubertin, however, this path was also clear. In his view, the key lay in emulating the school system of the United Kingdom, particularly the integral and character-forming role that organized sport played in it.

De Coubertin attended a plethora of English schools, including rugby in 1886, where he said he had seen it before [him] the cornerstone of the British Empire’.

Not long after, he founded the Union des Sociétés Françaises de Sports Athlétiques (USFSA), a body that governed most sports in France until the end of World War I. Rugby was at the heart of his ambitions and grew from strength to strength under his leadership.

In March 1892, two Parisian clubs, Stade Français and Racing Club de France, contested the first final of the French rugby championship. The referee was none other than de Coubertin, who founded the modern Olympics later that decade – although that’s another story.

Originally, rugby in France was reserved for the aristocrats and the upper bourgeoisie. By the 1910s, however, its appeal had become more widespread. According to Philip Dine in his book French Rugby Football: A Cultural History, attendance at international matches routinely exceeded 20,000 before the outbreak of World War I. When France lost one of those games, in 1913 by Scotland, angry fans stormed the pitch, attacked the referee and, as Dine put it, ‘then rampaged’ through Paris.

André Lhote was born in Bordeaux in 1885. After an apprenticeship as a carpenter, he turned to painting – and in 1910, four years after moving to the French capital, he had his first solo exhibition at the Galerie Druet in Paris.

His early work showed the influence of the Fauves. However, it is Cubism with which Lhote is most closely associated. He was part of the group of Cubists known as the Section d’Or, which also included Robert Delaunay, Albert Gleizes and Francis Picabia, who banded together in the run-up to World War I.

This conflict did not pose as much of a career obstacle for Lhote as it did for many others, as he was declared unfit for duty early on with an eye problem. Around 1917 he began a series of paintings of rugby matches.

The best-known example is now in the collection of the Center Pompidou in Paris. The image up for auction is smaller, but no less appealing.

Two teams can be distinguished based on the players’ jerseys: one in burgundy, the other in amber and green checks. However, the viewer is not intended to admire a specific passage of the game or recognize a specific moment in a game. The painting is more about evoking the general buzz of a matchstick.

In Cubist fashion, there is no illusion of real space from a single angle. Instead, Lhote has broken down the composition into a series of planes pushing against each other: a pair in blue, for example, to represent the sky, and four or five in green to represent the pitch.

At the top left of the picture he shows part of a building; and what appears to be the dotted faces of a crowd on a gray plane to the right. The focus, however, is on the players themselves: tight, angular figures whose shapes intertwine like in a match.

Describing his fondness for rugby, Lhote said: “It’s exciting to capture a moving spectacle where everything seems to stand still for a second before picking up again at an even faster rate, like a pendulum at the end of its orbit.”

For Lhote and many of his Section d’Or peers, rugby was a dynamic, modern sport that – like aviation and the Eiffel Tower – provided an appropriate subject for a dynamic, modern movement like Cubism. Delaunay captured it in his painting The Cardiff team from 1912-13 (above), there are a few different versions of this; and Gleizes captured it soccer player (below), now owned by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC

The development of Cubism was a complex affair. However, it is worth noting that the Section d’Or differed greatly from the so-called Analytical Cubism of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, the co-founders of Cubism, in two respects. First, lighter colors were used. Second, his scenes showed greater vitality and expanse (Picasso and Braque tended to produce subtle portraits and still lifes).

Much of the vitality of Les rugby men results from the waveform that the players form together, viewed from left to right.

Lhote not only made art, but also wrote about it and taught it – with great renown. Between the wars he served as a critic for La Nouvelle Revue Française; and in 1939 and 1950 he published treatises on landscape and figure painting respectively. In the mid-1920s he also opened his own art school, the Académie André Lhote, in Montparnasse, where students included Tamara de Lempicka, Hans Hartung and the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson.

In conversation with The New York Times late in life, Cartier-Bresson said, “Everything I know about photography I learned from André Lhote… There has to be freedom, yes, but always with a sense of form and structure behind it.”

A look at Les Rugbymen proves that Lhote practiced what he preached by showing a sense of freedom, form, structure and more.

Discover 20th Century Art Week at Christie’s in Paris