Competitive art was once an Olympic sport. Did you know that before the middle of the 20th century, art competitions were held at the Olympics? Find out how these competitions came to be part of the Games and why they aren’t still around today.
Art competitions formed part of the modern Olympic Games during its early years, from 1912 to 1948. The competitions were part of the original intention of the Olympic Movement’s founder, Pierre de Frédy, Baron de Coubertin. Medals were awarded for works of art inspired by sport, divided into five categories: architecture, literature, music, painting, and sculpture.
The History of the Olympics
With the founding of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 1894, and the celebration of the first modern Olympic Games, French Baron Pierre de Coubertin saw the fulfillment of his ideals—men being educated in both mind and body and competing in sport rather than war.
One of his other desires was to combine both art and sport, and he thus considered including artistic competition in the Olympic Games.
In May 1906, Baron de Coubertin organized a meeting in Paris for both IOC members and representatives of artists’ organizations.
The meeting ended with a proposal to the IOC to organize artistic competitions at the Olympic Games in five areas (architecture, literature, music, painting, and sculpture). The works of art entered had to be inspired by sports.
Preparations were underway to hold such competitions at the 1908 Summer Olympics, which were scheduled for Rome, Italy. However, the Italian organizers were faced with financial troubles due to the Vesuvius eruption of 1906 and were forced to halt preparations, and the IOC awarded the organization to London in 1907.
The British Organizers
The British organizers planned to hold the art competitions, but because of the short preparation time, they were canceled. The organizers felt that artists would not have enough time to send in their works.
Pierre de Coubertin was not discouraged and sought to include the artistic events in the program of the 1912 Summer Olympics, to be held in Stockholm, Sweden. Although the Swedes initially objected, opposing the idea of art combined with competition, they eventually gave in.
The number of entrants was rather disappointing: only 35 artists are known to have sent works of art to Sweden, but gold medals were awarded in all five categories.
About The First Post War Olympics
When the first post-war Olympic Games were held in war-ravaged Belgium, art contests were again on the program, although they were little more than a sideshow. This was different from the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris.
The contests were taken seriously for the first time, and 193 artists submitted works. This figure included three Soviet artists, even though the Soviet Union officially did not take part in the Olympic Games, which they considered to be a “bourgeois” festival.
The Amsterdam Olympics
The growth continued at the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics, where over 1,100 works of art were exhibited in the Municipal Museum, not including the submissions in literature, music, and architecture.
Artists were allowed to sell their works at the close of the exhibition, which was rather controversial given the IOC’s amateurism policy, which required all competitors to be amateurs. In Amsterdam, the number of events was also increased, as four of the five fields of art were subdivided, creating more events.
Because of the economy and the remote location of Los Angeles, participation in the athletic events of the 1932 Games was lower than that of 1928. The art competition did not suffer from this problem, and the number of artworks entered remained stable.
IOC Meeting in Rome
In 1949, a report was presented at the IOC meeting in Rome which concluded that practically all contestants in the art competitions were professionals and that the competitions should therefore be abolished and replaced with an exhibition without awards or medals.
This sparked a heated debate within the IOC. At a 1951 meeting, the IOC decided to reinstate the competitions for the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki. However, the organizers claimed there was insufficient time, and an art competition was not held. An art exhibition took place in its stead.
The issue continued to be debated within the Olympic Movement, and at the 49th IOC Session in Athens, in 1954, the IOC members voted to replace the art contests with an exhibition for future Olympics. Several attempts have been made to re-include them but without success.
Despite no longer holding art competitions, the Olympic games continue to be connected with art exhibitions.
The Olympic Charter required organizers of the Olympic Games to include a program of cultural events, to “serve to promote harmonious relations, mutual understanding, and friendship among the participants and others attending the Olympic Games”.
The art competition
A total of 33 people participated in the inaugural art competition in 1912, with gold medals awarded in all five categories. Judges were only allowed to score works that had never been exhibited anywhere else, and those that were dedicated to sports.
De Coubertin himself participated in a literature competition in Stockholm under a pseudonym. His “Ode to Sport” received a gold medal.
One interesting fact from the 1912 Games was that the USA’s Walter Winans, winner of an Olympic gold medal in shooting just four years earlier, became the Olympic champion in sculpture. In Sweden, he also won a silver medal in shooting.
Other than Winans, only one person has won medals in both art and sports competitions, with the Hungarian swimmer Alfred Hajos winning two golds at Athens in 1896, followed some years later by a silver medal in architecture.
The Format of the Competition
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 architectural plans were for stadiums and arenas.
The format of the competitions was inconsistent and occasionally chaotic: a category might garner a silver medal, but no gold, or the jury might be so disappointed in the submissions that it awarded no medals at all.
At the 1928 Amsterdam Games, the literature category was split into lyric, dramatic, and epic subcategories, then reunited as one for 1932, and then split again in 1936.
Many art world insiders viewed the competitions with distrust. “Some people were enthusiastic about it, but quite a few were standoffish,” Stanton says. “They didn’t want to have to compete, because it might damage their reputations.”
Deliberation on the Competition
The fact that the events had been initiated by art outsiders, rather than artists, musicians, or writers—and the fact that all entries had to be sport-themed—also led many of the most prominent potential entrants to decide the competitions were not worth their time.
Still, local audiences enjoyed the artworks—during the 1932 Games, nearly 400,000 people visited the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art to see the works entered—and some big names did enter the competitions.
John Russell Pope, the architect of the Jefferson Memorial, won a silver at the 1932 Los Angeles Games for his design of the Payne Whitney Gymnasium, constructed at Yale University.
Italian sculptor Rembrandt Bugatti, American illustrator Percy Crosby, Irish author Oliver St. John Gogarty, and Dutch painter Isaac Israëls were other prominent entrants.
In 1940 and 1944, the Olympics were put on hold as nearly all participating countries became embroiled in the violence and destruction of World War II. When they returned, the art competitions faced a bigger problem: the new IOC president’s obsession with absolute amateurism.
“American Avery Brundage became the president of the IOC, and he was a rigid supporter of amateur athletics,” Stanton says. “He wanted the Olympics to be completely pure, not to be swayed by the weight of money.”
Summary
Because artists inherently rely on selling their work for their livelihood—and because winning an Olympic medal could theoretically serve as a sort of advertisement for the quality of an artist’s work—Brundage aimed the art competitions, insisting they represented an unwelcome incursion of professionalism.
Although Brundage himself had once entered a piece of literature in the 1932 Games’ competitions and earned an honorable mention, he stridently led a campaign against the arts following the 1948 Games.
