Sports and American Art from Benjamin West to Andy Warhol

Guttmann (English and American studies, Amherst U.)employs an unusual format to marry American history with the history of sports art in the country, exploring the parallel development of sport, art, and the American character through time. He outlines the colonial, antebellum, post Civil War, industrial, and late 20th century periods in turn, characterizing the socio-political state of the nation, the predominant forms of sport, and the state of the art world, respectively. Guttmann then traces the intersection of sport and art in these periods- the cricketers and ice skaters of colonial paintings; wrestlers, sailors, and baseball players of late 19th century art; Warhol portraits of athletes such as Dorothy Hamill and Muhammad Ali and considers how each of the two activities informs and reveals the other throughout their mutual history. Annotation c2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Allen Guttmann is professor of English and American studies at Amherst College. Among his many books on the history of sports are Sports: The First Five Millennia (University of Massachusetts Press) and From Ritual to Record: The Nature of Modern Sports.