Boxing and Art

This essay explores the way sport and art as expressions of human confrontation with violence have been re-enacted in Europe through the representation of boxing. Tracing visual representation of boxing from Greek antiquity to today, it focuses on the way the dynamics of pugilism both informed and were reflected in modernist avant-garde movements such as Futurism. Like painting and sculpture, the boxing ring is susceptible to analysis in purely abstract terms – forces, space, dynamic interaction – a formal schematisation that tells us as much – if not more – about the potential of the human body in its environment as more conventional forms of visual representation.