Historic Highlights: Early Olympics featured competitions in art

Today, many criticize the Olympics for the bloated number of medal events, including sports that many fans have never heard of.

A century ago, the early installments of the modern Games had some surprising choices as well – including art.

From 1912-48, art was a medal competition at the Games, a part of the Olympic story that is mostly forgotten today. Like much of the history of the Olympics, there was plenty of controversy.

The art competitions of the Olympics were the brainchild of Baron de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Games in 1896. One modern writer states that the Baron “was particularly impressed with the idea of what it meant to be a true Olympian – someone who was not only athletic but skilled in music and literature.”

Five disciplines – architecture, literature, music, painting and sculpture – were generally included as medal competitions.

Normally, competitors did not try for medals in both sports and the arts, as only two competitors were medalists in both athletics and art. The oldest-ever Olympic medalist is John Copley of Great Britain, who won a silver in the arts in 1948 at age 73.

In a questionable conflict of interest, de Coubertin himself entered the 1912 art competition under a pseudonym, winning a gold medal.

Another future president of the International Olympic Committee, Avery Brundage, was an athlete at the 1912 Games in pentathlon and decathlon, and also competed twice in art, in 1932 and 1936.

A track standout at the University of Illinois who made a fortune in Chicago real estate construction and ownership, Brundage is blasted today for his racist and anti-Semitic views. Similarly, de Coubertin has been criticized for his disdain of female athletes.

Many artists were suspicious of the Olympic art competitions, which were inspired by nonartists like de Coubertin, rather than art professionals themselves. As a result, many artists worried for their reputations and chose to skip Olympic competitions.

As the art competitions developed, they attracted plenty of entrants and throngs of onlookers. Despite the global Depression, the art division of the 1932 Games at Los Angeles attracted an estimated 384,000 visitors during the two weeks of the event.

A total of 144 participants from 16 nations with 300 exhibits made up the 1932 competition, which was overseen by a jury of internationally recognized professionals. Among the medalists was John Russell Pope, the architect of the Jefferson Memorial, who collected a silver for design of the gymnasium at Yale University.

The professional aspect of art may have been its demise in the Games. The autocratic Brundage was a fervent supporter of amateurism in the Olympics in his tenure as IOC President from 1952-72, which influenced the decision to drop art.

A 2012 article in Smithsonian Magazine notes that Brundage “stridently led a campaign against the arts” after the 1948 Olympics. Ironically, Brundage was a major collector of artwork.

The 1952 Olympics in Helsinki featured art as an exhibition, rather than a medal event. In 1954, juried art competitions were dropped from the Olympic menu, and the 151 all-time medals in art are no longer counted in the Olympic record.

Today, researchers have found that many of the exhibits from Olympic art competitions no longer exist, and records of the competitions are sketchy at best. That reflects the remarkably poor record-keeping of the early Olympic Games, whose organizers rarely left many statistics or much detail.

• Tom Emery is a freelance writer and historical researcher from Carlinville, Illinois. He may be reached at 217-710-8392 or ilcivilwar@yahoo.com.