Lecture by Christian Vivier

Christian Vivier

Depicting the moving bodies of athletes: a major challenge for contemporary Western painting (19th - 20th centuries) 

Lecture in French 

Although pictorial art has long been interested in 'sport', as far as we know there is little work on the way in which Western painters have attempted to represent what is the essence of sport, namely movement. The term 'movement' is commonly used to cover the idea of motion, mobility, dynamism and speed. This conference will attempt to consider this notion in all its complexity, from an approach influenced by the physical sciences to an eminently social and political vision of speed and acceleration, via an understanding of the meaning of bodily and sporting movement associated with modernity, health and emotion. 

Christian Vivier is a university lecturer at the UFR STAPS in Besançon and director of the C3S 'Culture, Sport, Health, Society' laboratory at the University of Franche-Comté. His research focuses on the cultural history of sport and visual studies. Based on the semiological analysis of artistic representations of sport (lithographs, paintings, posters, photographs, films, comic strips, etc.), his aim is to reveal the very meaning - intimate and profound, individual and collective, social and cultural - of the bodily movements that motivated physical exercise enthusiasts in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.

This conference is part of the "Residence in Museums" initiative organised by the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), of which the Fernand Léger National Museum is a partner in 2023-2024. As part of this residency in Biot, the scientific research project led by Christian Vivier, a teacher-researcher at the Université de Franche Comté-Besançon, will focus on representations of physical, sporting and leisure movement in Fernand Léger's work.

 To find out more about this programme, click here 
 To find out more about the work of Fernand Léger, click here

This programme of lectures is a co-production between UCArts - Direction de la Culture d'Université Côte d'Azur and the National Museums of the 20th Century in the Alpes-Maritimes. The six lectures are organised in partnership with the Association of the Friends of the Marc Chagall National Museum. 

The programme has been developed by the museum in collaboration with Josiane Rieu, professor of 16th-century French literature at the Université Côte d'Azur and a member of the CTEL, Centre Transdisciplinaires d'Epistémologie de la Littérature et des Arts Vivants. 

To find out more about our conference programme for the 2023-24 season, click here

Christian Vivier. Photo : © DR, 2023