SPRUANCE, Benton

Lithograph

21 1/8 x 25 3/4" MAT

In the 1930s college football was the national rage, attracting over 70,000 to some games and immortalizing the Notre Dame football team and Knut Rockne. Benton Spruance’s Spinner Play, 1934, depicts college kids from the University of Pennsylvania. Spruance’s print, in its extreme stylization of the figures, aims to reveal the essential power of the game, the brute force of one team pitted against another. The game was brutal too: in 1931 there were 40 college fatalities, a figure which diminished only slightly throughout the decade.

1934

SPRUANCE, Benton

b. United States, 1904-1967

Gift of Don Trevey to the Ken Trevey Collection of American Realist Prints

1992.162