This volume focuses on the modernist and avant-garde engagement with workers’ sport events that were organised or were planned to be organised in the cities of Central Europe and the USSR in the period of 1920–1932: Frankfurt am Main – Vienna – Moscow – Prague – Budapest – Berlin.
During the 1920s and 1930s, two organisations of workers’ sport operated: the Lucerne Sport International/Socialist Workers’ Sport International and the Red Sport International, which held the socialist Workers’ Olympics and the communist Spartakiads, respectively. These events were not aimed at cultivating national victories and individual athletic records, but at mobilising workers for the class struggle and at creating new culture for the working class. This book examines the visual propaganda of the Workers’ Olympics and the Spartakiads expressed through paintings, sculptures, prints, illustrations, posters, postcards, photomontages, photographs, films, theatre and architectural projects. It emphasises the significance of workers’ sport for the artistic and social changes within a utopian project of a new culture, as visualised by the modernist and avant-garde artists, including Varvara Stepanova, Gustav Klucis, and Otto Nagel.
This volume is of great use to students and scholars of the history of sport, art history and cultural history in interwar Europe and the Soviet Union.
Author(s): Przemysław Strożek
Series: Routledge Histories of Central and Eastern Europe
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 232
City: London
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introducing the History of Workers’ Sport to Modernist and Avant-garde Studies
The Workers’ Sport Movement in the 1920s and 1930s: The Largest Working-Class Cultural Movement in History
The State of Scholarship on the History of the Interwar Workers’ Sport Movement
Methods and Research Perspectives
The Structure of the Book
Notes
Chapter 1: The New Great Power: The First Workers’ Olympics in Frankfurt am Main as a Socialist Olympia, 1925
Connecting Ancient Olympics to Social Democracy: Olympiade and the Official Poster by Willibald Krain
Cultural Events of the First Workers’ Olympics: Alfred Auerbach’s Kampf um die Erde and the Olympic Exhibition in the Haus der Werkbund
Documentation of the First Workers’ Olympics and Wilhelm Prager’s Die neue Grossmacht
Criticism and Reception of the First Workers’ Olympics in Weimar Germany and the Third Reich
Notes
Chapter 2: The Giants at the Prater Stadium: Visualising the Second Workers’ Olympics in the Socialist Paradise: The Red Vienna, 1931
The Art of Red Vienna and the 1920s Neuer Mensch of Socialism
Der Kuckuck, Victor Theodor Slama, Joseph Binder and the Visual Propaganda of the Second Workers’ Olympics
Photo-documentation of the Second Workers’ Olympics
Artists of the Red Vienna After the Second Workers’ Olympics
Notes
Chapter 3: ‘Every Worker Athlete Must Be a Soldier of the Revolution’: From Vsevobuch to Gustav Klucis’s Spartakiada Series, 1928
Vsevobuch and Militarisation of Communist Sport: Vladimir Mayakovsky – Vsevolod Meyerhold – Nikolai Podvoisky
Vkhutemas Artists and the Red Sport International
The Spartakiada Series by Gustav Klucis
Documentation of the Spartakiad in the Official Report
On Visual Propaganda of the RSI
Notes
Chapter 4: The Communist Workers’ Sport for the Revolution, for the Proletariat, for the People: Devětsil, FPT and the Visual Propaganda of the Second Spartakiad in Prague, 1928
Early Devĕtsil Views on Sport and Its Significance for Proletarian Culture
Výboj, Dělnická Tělovýchova and the FPT’s Visual Propaganda for the Second Spartakiad in Prague
The Connections between Workers’ Sport and Avant-Garde in ReD
The FPT vs. DTJ: Devětsil, Soviet Constructivists and Ladislav Sutnar
Notes
Chapter 5: The Collective Embodiment of the Red Man: Workers’ Physical Training Association, Munka Circle and Workers’ Photography in Budapest
The Figure of Red Man and the Role of Propaganda Posters for the Republic of Councils in Hungary
Hungarian Avant-garde in Exile: Lajos Kassák, László Moholy-Nagy and Sports
Discussions in the Magazines 100% and Munka on the Workers’ Sport
Workers’ Photography and Workers’ Sport
Notes
Chapter 6: ‘Overcoming All Obstacles – Red Sport!’: Visualising Solidarity and Hope for Communist Sport in Berlin, 1931–1932
Sports Motifs by Artists Associated with the Communist Party: George Grosz and John Heartfield
Workers’ Photography, ASV Fichte Club and Its Cultural Activities in Berlin
Kuhle Wampe and the Second Spartakiad in Berlin
The Ban on Workers’ Sport and the Failure of Red Sport after 1933
Notes
Conclusion
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
