Excuses are thin on the ground for failing to visit the Fitzwilliam Museum. The University of Cambridge’s principal museum is surrounded by buildings belonging to its oldest college, Peterhouse. So, for three years, when I was an undergraduate there, it was impossible for me to go very far without walking past it.
And yet – how do I say this? – somehow I never quite made it through the front door. Not once. Thousands of near misses; no hits. Nor can I blame being late to art – my mother was an art teacher. No, it’s even worse than philistinism. The number of pretentious undergraduate arguments about art and life: many. The number of visits to the actual art gallery: zero.
And now, 29 years late, it is sport that draws me across the threshold. To mark the centenary of the 1924 Paris Olympics Games, the Fitzwilliam is staging “Paris 1924: Sport, Art and the Body”. It’s a superb show: do visit if you can.
In one sense, the exhibition is tied to Cambridge. Paris 1924 was the Chariots of Fire Olympics when the recent graduate Harold Abrahams won gold in the 100-metre dash. Elite universities were bound up with sport’s sharp end as well as its nostalgic glow. In typically British style, different traditions – a gentlemanly tone but a scientific edge – were being rewritten to meet the needs of the moment.
At a deeper level, the exhibition, which features Pablo Picasso, Robert Delaunay and André Lhote among others, is universal. In demonstrating the interrelatedness of sport and art in 1924, the show captures a particular cultural moment. Sport had suddenly caught artists’ attention, especially the cubists and the futurists, and the culture of games and competition looked like the future of art, not just the future of entertainment.
For that reason, the era under review in Paris 1924 feels like a high watermark. Because if we step back for a moment and take a wider sweep, sport has ended up with a curious and underdeveloped relationship with painting. Why did the tradition not quite develop? How come sport and art looked set to have a much more interesting future together than the one that transpired?
Partly, of course, sports painting was superseded by sports photography. Today’s athletes are among the most photographed people in the world. The American sportswriter George Plimpton deftly summarised the problem of “painting sport” in his assessment of a 1920s realist boxing canvas by George Bellows. It was the kind of painting, Plimpton quipped, “that photography really does now”. Exactly. How does a painter find a unique perspective when sport is broadcast in high definition and photographed from every angle?
But there is more to the difficulty of “sports art” than just the ubiquity of mainstream photography. I think there is something more fundamental. For example, although my own sport – cricket – has inspired some celebrated paintings, almost all of them succeed by evoking the aesthetic backdrop, the ambience or the social scene; none springs to mind that takes us into the heat of the competitive story. Sport, having already created its own dramatic world, generally resists a second layer of (artistic) dramatisation. In some respects, the athlete and the artist – as rival creators of stories about the human condition – are trespassing on each other’s territory.
Which is why I think sports painting may be best suited to partial abstraction. And that’s often the case with the standouts in this exhibition. André Lhote’s Tennis Players splices tennis rackets and stylised bob-haired players – but we still know exactly what they’re doing, that it’s cool, and that sport feels like the future.
In Robert Delaunay’s Runners, inspired by the 1924 Paris Games, we see five runners taking a bend on the track together. But the real focus and energy of the painting doesn’t derive from the humans (who aren’t given faces, let alone expressions), but from their colourful and contrasting athletic strips. Their colours are competing, in the race and in the painting. Before seeing it in person, I hadn’t understood how Delaunay’s Runners captures sport not just with colour, but also illuminates sport through colour.
Another highlight (and similarly partially abstracted) was entirely new to me: Enzo Benedetto’s Cyclist. The Italian futurists were obsessed by sport and the rise of the machine. Filippo Marinetti, the founder of the movement, had declared in 1916 that “the new religion-morality of speed is born”, adding that “sportsmen are the initiates to this religion”. Cyclist interweaves the bicycle and the cyclist to such an extent that the body and the machine morph into one.
Perhaps the futurist intoxication with sport, which veered very close to fascism’s obsession with strength and dominance, left art’s interwar flirtation with sport looking islanded on the wrong side of history from a post-Second World War perspective. Maybe it was time to put sport back in its box: a popular pastime, a wholesome mass entertainment, a bourgeois diversion.
Sport has become very much bigger, richer and more mainstream in the intervening 100 years. But you leave this exhibition feeling that sport, in some respects, never got more interesting or surprising than it was in 1924.
Ed Smith is director of the Institute of Sports Humanities.
[See also: I am a natural sportsman while sedentary]
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This article appears in the 25 Jul 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Summer Special 2024