At the turn of the century, as the baron struggled to build the modern Olympics from scratch, he was unable to convince overextended local organizers of the first few Games in Athens, St. Louis and Paris that arts competitions were necessary. But he remained adamant. Finally, in time for the Stockholm Games , he was able to secure a place for the arts.
Submissions were solicited in the categories of architecture, music, painting, sculpture and literature, with a caveat—every work had to be somehow inspired by the concept of sport. Some 33 mostly European artists submitted works, and a gold medal was awarded in each category.
The baron himself was among the winners. Over the next few decades, as the Olympics exploded into a premier international event, the fine arts competitions remained an overlooked sideshow.
To satisfy the sport-inspired requirement, many paintings and sculptures were dramatic depictions of wrestling or boxing matches; the majority of the architecture plans were for stadiums and arenas. More than 70, people visited the accompanying exhibition over the course of its four weeks on display. And the Reich, according to the Official Report, "generously arranged for the transference of the sums realized from the sale of art objects without the usual formalities.
What ultimately brought about a full overhaul of the sporting divisions of the Olympic Games is what crippled and eventually killed its artistic counterpart: the amateurism dilemma. Professional artists were barred from the competition, in keeping with the rules that also governed the sport events of the Games. The athletic events would later radically evolve to accommodate professional athletes, but the art competitions were less receptive to the inclusion of professionals; formal Olympic documents would later deem it "illogical that professionals should compete at such exhibitions and be awarded Olympic medals" and attribute the art contests' demise to complications in determining the amateur status of the artists.
The amateurism decree also severely undermined the quality of the entrant pools—and the entries themselves. Creating an engaging piece of Olympics-inspired art is a notoriously difficult task , and taking away professionals' right to try their hands at it didn't help. Olympic juries in those days had the right to withhold a first-, second-, or third-place prize or all of the above when works failed to meet the standards they imposed; juries were known to withhold as many as 13 art medals in a single Olympics, and it's not hard to imagine that each "no prize awarded" was in itself a tiny, spiteful act of protest by these elite clusters of art critics and professors.
After the games, the Olympic art competitions were modified into a parallel art festival and exhibition held at the site of each Summer and Winter Games. The lack of existing resources on the topic makes it difficult to say what exactly these art competitions meant to the international art community, or to the Olympics. Or perhaps that paucity itself indicates precisely what degree of lasting impact they had—very little. Were the Olympic art contests a failed experiment, or simply a curious little relic of an age and an ideology that came and went?
The answer to that question, like Gerhardus Bernardus Westermann's Horseman , may be lost to the unyielding passage of time. Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Popular Latest. The Atlantic Crossword. Sign In Subscribe. Wilhelm Limpert.
The Rise And Fall? The Lost Sports of the Summer Olympics. As a young man, De Coubertin had become enamoured with the gymnasiums of ancient Greece, which offered rigorous intellectual and physical training. The original Olympic Games, which had been held every four years from BC until they were banned by Emperor Theodosius I in AD , had embraced the same concept and included competitions for sculpture, poetry and other arts — including trumpeting — alongside those for sports such as running, wrestling and chariot racing.
The Olympic Museum, Lausanne. Though De Coubertin campaigned passionately for art to be included in the Olympics from the first, his fellow organisers rejected the idea.
While it was, they pointed out, easy to measure who ran metres the fastest or threw a discus furthest, determining the winner in a field of statues or peloton of poems would be altogether more difficult, if not impossible. It was in at the Fifth Olympiad in Stockholm, therefore, that the baron finally realised his dream. The Games that summer saw medals awarded for painting, sculpture, literature, music and architecture.
If there were fears he might be overwhelmed, they proved groundless: the entire competition attracted a meagre 35 entrants. Baron Pierre de Coubertin, photographed on a motor tricycle in the south of France.
As well as an aesthetic sensibility, De Coubertin had experience of art competitions from close at hand. The baron appears to have drawn inspiration from this behaviour when it came to making his own selections. Only four painters had entered the first Olympic Art Competition. The winner was Carlo Pellegrini, an Italian best known for his — admittedly rather charming — postcard illustrations of winter sports in the Alps.
A similar fate also befell the two most renowned artists to enter the sculpture competition. Instead, De Coubertin hung the gold medal around the muscular neck of a wealthy, red-blooded American, Walter W. It gave the burly outdoorsman a unique double: he had previously won gold in the sporting section of the games for double-shot running-deer shooting.
De Coubertin had been seeking a modern Olympic exemplar of the Greek ideal of mind and body in equilibrium. In the unlikely shape of Winans — sportsman, sculptor and author of a number of books including Hints on Revolver Shooting and How to Handle a Revolver — he seemed to have found it.
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