The Sulky Driver by Farpi Vignoli (ITA), gold medal in sculpture, Berlin 1936
To viewers at home, the Olympics are presented as an awkward sandwich indeed. There are 16 days of world-class competition between two ornate ceremonies, opening and closing, both of which overflow with extravagant, obscure and potentially superfluous imagery. In other words, art. In the Games' present televised form, it occasionally proves difficult to fathom the importance of native costumes, light shows, and sequined dancers in the Olympic context -- at least as anything other than expensive and frivolous entertainment.
There was a time, however, when art had a much more prominent and defined role every Olympiad. The founder of the modern Olympics, Pierre de Coubertin, desired for the quadrennial event to be not only the world's preeminent sporting spectacle, but an important cultural one as well. Once the Olympic Movement had survived its rocky first decade (taking a back seat to World's Fairs in Paris and Saint Louis), Coubertin attempted to build on the Games' foundation and incorporate the arts. As he would write in a 1910 essay, "The first necessity was to revive them, and the second to shape them."
That shape manifested itself in Olympic art competitions. Coubertin's dream was to organize painting, sculpture and architecture events, the winners of which would receive the same gold medals as those given out for swimming, running and jumping. Competitors would be judged on their ability to capture the pure sporting ideal in their work. But unfortunately for the founder, the London 1908 organizing committee was nowhere near as amenable to this idea as he was.
Neither were the organizers of the Games of the 5th Olympiad at Stockholm 1912. But when Coubertin threatened to stage a one-man boycott and stay home in France, the Swedes relented. The first-ever Olympic art competition had few entrants, but gold medals -- real Olympic gold medals -- were awarded in architecture, music, sculpture, painting and literature. The Olympic champion in the latter field was the only written piece submitted, a stirring 10-stanza Ode to Sport penned by the German two-man team of Georges Hohrod and M. Eschbach. It concluded so:
O Sport, you are peace! You forge happy bonds between the peoples by drawing them together in reverence for strength which is controlled, organized and self-disciplined. Through you the youth of the world learn to respect one another, and thus the diversity of national traits becomes a source of generous and peaceful emulation.
Coubertin would, several years later, admit to having written the piece himself.
The art competitions were once again held at Antwerp eight years later when the Games returned from World War I. Not much is known about those due to the organizing committee's quick bankruptcy (nobody was left to organize the records), except that there were more entries than at Stockholm. The painting and architecture competitions, however, were judged to be lackluster enough that no gold was awarded, only silver.
When it was the turn of the French to host again in 1924, Coubertin found a much more willing audience for his cultural idea within the Paris committee. The call to art went out around the world for submissions, to newspapers the globe over. The New York Times, for whatever reason, proclaimed the news as something new, as if the previous two Olympic art competitions hadn't occurred. (figure, right) The entries poured in -- 235 of them in total for the five competitions, and 77 were turned away due to substandard quality or non-adherence to the sport theme. Coubertin wouldn't need to save face with a nom de plume'd entry, the event was a success.
The art competitions continued in 1928, 1932, 1936 and 1948, but medal-winning work did not translate to wider audiences. Indeed, we don't consider the majority of the Olympic champions to be masters whose work transcended generations, and only art history buffs or fervent museum-goers would recognize most of those names today, save for perhaps Jean Gauguin, the Danish son of painter Paul who took a gold in Paris for his sculptor of a boxer. The winning sculpture in Amsterdam 1928 was a study of a boxer as well, crafted by Frenchman Paul Landowski, who would go on to design what some believe to be a Wonder of the World, the Christ the Redeemer statue that overlooks the city of Rio de Janeiro (a 2016 Summer Games hopeful).
But most Olympic artists are lost to history, and apparently, so were the competition rules. Another underlying concern with the contests were the loose translations of Coubertin's insistence that Olympic art be Olympic-related. While it's a lovely work, the gold medal for painting in Los Angeles 1932 was David Wallin's At the Seaside of Arild (figure, left), a canvas that seems to have cropped out any and all sports-related content.
The final art competitions were held in 1948 at London, 11 years after Coubertin's death, in the war-damaged Victoria and Albert Museum. Few patrons attended. A year later at an International Olympic Committee Session, a commission headed by eventual IOC president Avery Brundage declared that the idea of Olympic medals for art ran counter to the Olympic ideal, as artists were professionals and not amateurs! Switzerland and Greece launched appeals, but Brundage had the final word. More determined researchers than I are welcome to figure if this was due to his snub in the 1932 literature competition, where he received only a honorable mention in a class where no bronze was awarded.
The final medal table for artistic competitions was dominated by Germany, who won eight gold, seven silver and nine bronze (24 total). Italy (5-7-2 = 14) and France (4-4-5 = 13) lagged behind, and the United States headed up a four-way tie for fourth (4-5-0 = 9). Since 1948, Olympic cities from then on were neither encouraged nor prohibited from presenting artistic exhibitions. For the next 40 years, art and sport barely coexisted at the Games, if at all.
But then came Barcelona. Those 1992 Games wore art on their sleeve, from its beautifully simplistic logo to an abstract mascot designed by Javier Mariscal to a wild opening ceremony featuring 200 flamenco dancers and a boat that made its way across the stadium floor amongst a human Mediterranean sea. For the first time ever, the Games featured what organizers called a "Cultural Olympiad," a four-year arts festival that ran from the Seoul 1988 closing ceremony to late 1992. Not only are those Games credited for saving the Olympics from themselves (however temporarily), it was the first time that Coubertin's dream of a marriage between art and sport at the Olympic was truly and fully realized.
Each Summer Olympic city since has followed Barcelona's lead -- Beijing is in the midst of the biggest and most comprehensive Cultural Olympiad yet. But now that art and sport are coexisting again at the Games, why not return to that lost tradition and forgotten opportunity of Olympic art competitions?
Imagine a worldwide competition -- with name recognition on par with the Nobel Prize -- in architecture, graphic arts, sculpture and literature. Especially in an age where most of those fields are , the Olympics have the opportunity to break down regional and national boundaries, to provide artists with a global showcase and the opportunity to inspire. (Especially if those rules that required sports-related content were removed.)
(Anybody interested in learning more about the Olympic art competitions should pick up Richard Stanton's The Forgotten Olympic Art Competition, which is so complete and authoritative that no further books on the subject are necessary. Additional information came from the May 2006 special edition of The Journal of Olympic History, ISOH's official publication.)
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