Vitalist Cubisms: The Biocultures of Virility, Militarism and La Vie Sportive

A monumental rugby player personifying Nietzsche’s ‘Übermensch’ appears caught in flight while leaping for the ball by the Eiffel Tower in Robert Delaunay’s L’Equipe de Cardiff. Amidst Delaunay’s simultaneous rhythmic pulsations and vibrations of complementary colour applied like the strident chromatic models used in posters, the place in which this happens appears as dynamic as the action capturing these vitalist sensations. By contrast, it is a union of rugby players who run with the ball in Albert Gleizes’ Les Joueurs de football, to signify their collective force. It is a pyramid of rugby players who support André Lhote’s rugby player soaring upwards in the match being played during the First World War by the battlefields of the Somme. The biocultural and biopolitical differences in the vitalism they portray is the focus of this chapter and the ways in which they are challenged by Pablo Picasso’s parodies of the newspaper sensationalism surrounding such events designed to produce virile bodies as ready to regenerate the French population as to fight in world wars.