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Exhibition at the Musée Marmottan Monet titled "En jeu ! Les artistes et le sport"

In the history of culture, artistic and sporting practices have frequently confronted each other in a dialogue of enthralling intensity. The ancient Greeks, for whom athletic prowesses had a mythical origin and a sacred character, solemnly celebrated this link with masterpieces such as Myron's Discobolus, the Charioteer of Delphi or the Apoxyòmenos. Centuries later, Velázquez and van Dyck portrayed numerous monarchs and noblemen sportingly engaged in hunting, in the pursuit of an aristocratic ideal of dexterity and physical strength. Not only sculptures and paintings, but also the very urban structures of our cities attest to the interconnection between these two disciplines, from Piazza Navona in Rome, which preserves the shape of Domitian's ancient equestrian stadium, to the great Mesoamerican fields where, amidst sacred incense and sacrifices, the ceremonial ritual of ballgame was performed.

It was especially in the 19th century, however, that the sporting phenomenon underwent a great revaluation, culminating in the revival of the Olympic Games by a French aristocrat, the Baron Pierre de Coubertin. At the same time, figurative arts also experienced a period of great splendour. The vertiginous poetry of a reality such as the modern world, which, like sport, is in perpetual change and movement, was celebrated by numerous schools of painting. The Impressionists, with their luminous and airy brushstrokes, led this artistic exploration, followed by the Expressionists with their vivid fauve colors, and later the Cubists and Futurists.

Paris, set to host the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad this summer, is celebrating the connection between art and sport with an exhibition at the Musée Marmottan Monet titled "En jeu ! Les artistes et le sport." Until September, Jules Marmottan's hôtel particulier will showcase over 160 significant works, with the aim of unfolding the visual history of sport from 1870 to 1930, a period marked by a fervent modernity, both in artistic and gymnastic terms.

A plaster mold of the Lysippean Wrestlers, depicting two muscular men locked in a fierce combat, welcomes visitors to the exhibition. The first room emphasizes the aristocratic origins of sport, which in the early 19th century was primarily practiced by the wealthy, who had ample leisure time. In search of cultural and social status, even before the ideal of a mens sana in corpore sano, 19th-century sportsmen and gentlemen engaged in activities such as horse riding and rowing. Painting, under the influence of the Impressionists, was breaking free from the rigid constraints of academic tradition and drawing inspiration from everyday life, including these sporting practices. An example in the first room is Edgar Degas's Race of Gentlemen before the Start, which vividly conveys the excitement of the racetrack and, in a strikingly modern style, brusquely crops the figures’ profiles out of the canvas.

Two works by Thomas Eakins, The Biglin Brothers in a Race and John Biglin in a Single Scull, focus on the theme of rowing with an almost photographic realism. Similarly, in more distinctly Impressionist pieces, such as Renoir's Regattas at Argenteuil and Alfred Sisley's Regattas at Molesey, sport provides a pretext for integrating a modern theme into en plein air landscapes, enlivened by the play of light and colour created by the water and the festive waving of flags.

The next room explores the evolution of sports and the arts at the end of the 19th century. While activities such as horse riding, fencing, and lawn tennis remained the domain of the wealthy, sports like cycling, boxing, and football quickly became popular among the urban and working classes, who could watch them in newly built arenas within the increasingly dense and urbanized cities. The idyllic countryside scenes in Ferdinand Gueldry's Annual Match, depicting a serene regatta on the Marne, or Monet's Skaters at Giverny, give way to more dynamic settings. These scenes are interpreted through methodologies that go beyond the superficiality of Impressionist observation and its mechanical reproduction of reality. This shift is exemplified by the cubist painter André Lhote, who deconstructs the volumes of the players in his Rugby Match and juxtaposes their faces on the surface in a pyramidal composition culminating in the oval ball, which radiates upwards like a shining star.

Jean Metzinger's Velodrome, inspired by the Paris-Roubaix bicycle road race, disassembles the sharp features of champion Charles Crupelandt into a whirlwind of geometric shapes, embodying the Futurist worship of speed and warrior-like dynamism. In contrast, Pierre Gatier's lithographs celebrate the golden splendour of the Belle Époque, depicting the elegant life of the Champs-Élysées and rue de la Paix. Meanwhile, other artists, like Marcel Gromaire in his watercolor The Tennis Player, chose to explore the deep social significance of sport, highlighting its ability to unite humanity beyond rigid social distinctions, using a biting, expressionist style.

In the 19th century, however, both sport and art remained predominantly male domains, women being relegated by the society of the time to subordinate and marginal roles. At a time when remarkable female painters such as Berthe Morisot, Eva Gonzalès or Mary Cassatt struggled to see their social role recognised, the same obstacles penalised sportswomen, who, despite a very timid appearance at the 1900 Games, and a growing participation in sports such as hockey, golf or lawn tennis, were bitterly stigmatised by Coubertin himself, who believed that their only purpose should be to ‘crown the winners’.

The next room of the exhibition explores these lacerating contradictions, which are also evident the artistic production of this era. Several artworks, in fact, often fell victim to prevailing prejudices, choosing to depict female athletes in poses that emphasised not so much their sporting ability as their physical attractiveness and the elegance of their clothes. Featured in this context are Woman in a Podoscaphe by Gustave Courbet, which challenges traditional genres by proposing a modern Amphitrite; La fortune et le coureur by Adolphe Willette, which illustrates faithfully Coubertin's stigma with a seductive personification of Fortune watching over an exhausted cyclist; and, lastly, Ferdinand Lunel's lithograph Chemins de fer de l'Ouest, Étretat, Tennis Club. While Lunel’s style is bold and succinct, it is thematically less innovative, as it depicts a tennis player in an outfit perhaps more suited to a seaside flânerie than to actual sporting activities.

The final rooms of the exhibition finally highlight further facets of this kaleidoscopic dialogue between art and sport. The focus shifts to the volumetric or photographic rendering of the sculptural anatomies of athletes, in representations and iconographies that sought to crystallise the instantaneousness of a gesture, the vigorous strength of a body, the dynamism of a movement. Georges Demenÿ's chronophotographs, in which the kinematics of an athlete’s pole vault performance are decomposed and displayed synchronously in the surface of a single image, exemplify this approach. A radically opposite attitude, entirely devoted to a synthetic and monumental style, animates Émile-Antoine Bourdelle's Hercules the Archer, also exhibited in the exhibition. In this sculpture, in fact, the anatomy of the Greek hero intent on battling the Stymphalian birds, throbs with an irrepressible tension and a primordial energy.

The exhibition wraps up in the museum's basement, where the final room invites visitors to reflect on the evolving connection between art and the professionalization of sport, and how these aspects intertwined with complex issues of identity and social constructs. This period, marked by racial and degrading stereotypes and a conflicting view of relations between cultures, is highlighted by Ángel Zárraga’s Portrait of Fausto dos Santos. By depicting a black-skinned Brazilian footballer, Zárraga challenges the lack of diversity and inclusion both in sports and art. In contrast, George Bellows's Soirée de Club conveys a sense of macabre unease, reminiscent of Goya, reflecting how boxing came to symbolize a broader, often oppressive, struggle for dominance.

These themes mark the conclusion of the exhibition. Before continuing to Monet’s Water Lilies in the next room, visitors can finally reflect on the deep and multifaceted relationship between sport and art, both of which have continually influenced our cultural history – and still do. It now remains to be seen what the agonistic (and artistic) outcomes of the upcoming Games of the XXXIII Olympiad will be!