Basketball (Convention Hall, Philadelphia) 1935

Curator: It's a powerful, almost overwhelming piece. I'm immediately drawn to the contrast between the packed stadium and the focused action on the court. It’s quite somber considering the action. Editor: Yes, the artist, Michael Leone, really captured a sense of starkness, despite the activity, in his 1935 charcoal drawing, “Basketball (Convention Hall, Philadelphia)." The use of monochrome emphasizes the scene's inherent structural forms. Look how he handled the textural difference between the solid masses and fleeting forms in space. Curator: Absolutely. Beyond the visible game itself, for me, there’s a palpable symbolic charge in how the spectator embodies themes of spectatorship, ambition, and perhaps the socio-political fervor of that period. This wasn't just entertainment, but communal catharsis. There's also a definite gaze enacted on the field—of many onto a single field. Editor: Precisely! Charcoal itself is a fantastic medium here because it is a direct by-product of burning. And here, look at how he utilizes its materiality to delineate layers of urban fabric, drawing attention to not only form and structure but labor itself, from that of the players on court to those producing and watching their activities. This scene shows an entire ecosystem, or industry around what some might naively think as ‘mere play’. Curator: True. One notices, too, how Leone framed the space with lettered signage –‘K, H, G, F, E, D, C’. He also captures something crucial, I feel: that a building provides more than just the location for basketball—a city's energy concentrates there as its community members rally together. Editor: Agreed. And he’s made visible how even what we perceive as abstract concepts—community, loyalty, etc—only come into being through particular relations, or the game in a very particular building, where a particular range of people are working on a particular day to create an economy of time well-spent together, or at all. A subtle reminder against being pulled into ideology! Curator: In that case, I will definitely revisit that observation. There’s much to see in Leone’s “Basketball,” so much social symbolism… I keep coming back to this gaze from the viewers. It is haunting. Editor: For me, understanding the artist’s choices with charcoal unveils a deeper sense of production and urban reality underlying it all, challenging any division between work and play in that period.