An obvious explanation of why in 1917 Giersing returned to the football motif would be to see it as a logical choice of motifs related to the aggressive and dynamic cubist and expressionist style towards which he had been working in the period 1916-17.
It has been suggested that Giersing might have been inspired to the theme of football, and more specifically the large-scale Sofus Heading, by Robert Delaunay's famous picture of rugby players, The Cardiff Team (1912-13). We can disregard this, and in any case football was not a particularly revolutionary or original motif in Copenhagen in 1917. The connection between Delaunay's and Giersing's pictures is rather due to the fact that both artists painted with photographs as their starting points.
It was the actual drama and movement in the game of foot-ball and the painterly projections of it on the surface that interested Giersing. Sofus Heading and the other football pictures from 1917-20 are concerned with painting and football and only indirectly with modern life or belief in progress or other futuristic intentions. In direct contrast to the futurists, Giersing worked in his football pictures with one coherent picture and with the immediate moment and a situation that was unresolved or indeterminate. The futuristic simultaneity in its various forms serves first and foremost to transcend the single moment by linking together a series of factors into a continuum. Giersing's on the other hand serves to point to and make visually probable a momentaneous climax.
The scenes in the football pictures are a kind of parallel to the painter's situation as Giersing described it. You can practice and train, but when the painter puts his brush to the canvas, as when Sofus headed the ball, there is no certainty. It might succeed, and it might not succeed. Seen in that perspective, the painter is himself a player.
Giersing treated his photographic sources in the same way as he approached every motif. He removed a bit here and added a bit there, but fundamentally he kept close to what he saw. As fundamental pictorial ideas, the photographs and the paintings deal with the same fundamental relationships in which every meeting - whether between Spain and Religion, the Virgin Mary and the angel or Sofus and the goalkeeper - is in principle of the same kind.
With a single possible exception, the football and ballet pictures from 1917 came to an end after half a dozen studies, which he painted from reproductions of works by Titian and El Greco 1916-17. The study has principally the character of a transforming confrontation between on the one hand the reproduction of the masters' pictures and on the other Giersing and his painting. A title like "Spain and Religion" does not as such serve as a reference to Titian's motif "Spain Coming to the Aid of religion", but as a reference to Titian and his painting, and thus to Giersing's painting as art on art and picture on picture.
Like the Titian and El Greco studies the football and ballet pictures are pictures based on pictures. And if a work of art is not only an artistic, but also artificial subject and an artificial referent in a semiotic sense, the same applies no less to the game of football and the art of ballet. This could be part of the explanation as to why Giersing chose these particular motifs. Another partial explanation might be that football players and in particular ballet dancers and dance exist in order to put themselves or something on display - just like a picture. And finally, there is the more concrete explanation that Giersing was interested in modern Russian ballet and in its modernity saw a link with his own efforts to create new kinds of beauty.
The sources of the ballet pictures were ingeniously arranged, mass-produced photographs. It is this kind of photograph and its tradition and devices, and not the futurists' or the impressionists' ballet and theatre pictures, with which he was also familiar, that Giersing takes over and adapts. The spatial dimension of the dance, the dancers' movements in the space created by the stage are things of which we receive no clear impression. The pictures of the ballerinas are fundamentally about the relationship between figure and ground and between reds and blues.
It is characteristic that in these pictures of eye-catching dancers the dancers have no eyes, or else they are masked. The figure wears a mask, as do the painter and the painting.
This picture of the artificial artist was not one that found much support at the time. By forgetting the sources and then, as we shall see, by forgetting the most extreme pictures, it was possible to maintain the concept of the original, natural artist and overlook the fact that it was the very nature of originality and the originality of naturalness that Giersing was debating in the pictures deriving from photographs. The football and ballet pictures showed Giersing accepting and paying homage to what at once were liveliest, most artistic or artificial sides of modern life, although they were not fundamentally a homage to modern life as such. It was at the stadium and in the theatre that exuberance was to be most fully experienced, set within a fixed framework, but having as its objective the unpredictable and striking new ideas emerging within the frame, exactly as in painting.