Art but Make It Sports: Epic Matchups Where Art and Sports Collide

Debut author Rader expands on his social media account of the same name for this entertaining look at the visual parallels between art and athletics. He organizes the book by sport, finding the “violence, chaos, and tension” of football in Juan Gris’s cubist Portrait of Pablo Picasso, which he sets alongside an up-close shot of quarterback Trevor Lawrence, his features askew from a hit to the head. For basketball, an image of women’s college coach Dawn Staley cutting down the net after winning the national championship is paired with Benvenuto Cellini’s sculpture Perseus with the Head of Medusa, whose serpentine hair and entrails mirror the net in Staley’s hand. Elsewhere, a photo of baseball star Jackie Robinson sliding into a base is juxtaposed with Elizabeth Jane Gardner Bouguereau’s The Shepherd David, whose biblical subject straddles a lion in victory. (All three, the author writes, were pioneers—Robinson for breaking the color barrier in baseball when he joined the Dodgers in 1947, Bouguereau for succeeding in the male-dominated painting world, and David for “taking on the larger-than-life Goliath.”) That’s as deep as the analysis gets, but the parallels drawn here are surprising and often irresistibly funny. This will delight the author’s fans and win him some new ones. (Mar.)