The Football Players

Mustachioed players in striped red-and-white uniforms leap and lunge for a ball among slender autumn trees, frozen in stiff, balletic poses against a patterned grove. Henri Rousseau renders the new craze for rugby football with his characteristic deadpan, faux-naive precision, the figures oddly weightless and decorative. Now in the Guggenheim, the Football Players turns a modern sport into something dreamlike and strange - the self-taught painter's flat, meticulous style lending the energetic game an air of solemn, slow-motion ritual, charming and slightly absurd, utterly unlike any academic sporting picture.