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Silver medal awarded to the painter Jack Butler Yeats,
brother of W.B. Yeats, in the Arts Competition (Ireland's first
medal)
Opera cloak, c.1924, attributed to Natalia
Gontcharova, organiser of the Olympic Ball
Anticipating the Olympiad - the 2024 Menton Lemon
Festival
Passing on of the Olympic flame before the Paralympic
Games as it toured France - Antibes, September 2024
A Phryge, the mascot of the Paris 2024
Games
PARIS 1924
Reviewed by ANDRE BEAUMONT
The exhibition Paris 1924 Sport, Art and the Body at the Fitzwilliam Museum is a truly well balanced show and educative about the first Paris Olympics, echoed a century later by the Paris 2024 Olympics and Paralympics.
There are the historical, sporting, cultural, commercial, local, global and artistic aspects all covered in one.
Introductory wall text
André Lhote, Tennis Players, 1917
Alexandre Calder, Helen Wills, 1927. After her win in 1924 her white visor became the rage on the Côte d'Azur
After a false start trying to get to the preview, I eventually saw the exhibition after the Olympics were over in Paris.
The Olympics was not all about sport so there is a surfeit of possible review material.
1924 was in the steam age but the steam age continued longer in France than in Britain and, as a child, we used to travel down to the Côte d'Azur first class on the night train hauled by the biggest locomotives. You might wake in the dead of night to the shouts of platform railmen and feel the shunt as it stopped at Lyon to change locomotive before pressing on. Theoretically it was still possible to go by the blue train but it was on its way out and it only ran once a week.
So having just steamed down there and having been exposed to a lot of modernist art [1], this review will mainly cover the contemporary and modernist art rather than the sport. Most of the art in the exhibition is not from 1924 itself but expands on the themes of the changing nature of sport and its influence on culture.
Jack Butler Yeats, The Liffey Swim, 1923 - expressionist rather than modernist
Pablo Picasso, The Wrestlers, 1921, lithograph - modernism drew so much from antiquity
It was the time of the birth of modernism. W.B. Yeats had won the Nobel Prize, T.S. Eliot had published The Waste Land and Le Corbusier Vers Une Architecture.
Le Corbusier, Vers Une Architecture, 1923
Jeanne Rij Rousseau The Wrestlers, 1924
Will Baumeister, Female Runner II, 1925
Umberto Boccioni, Unique, Forms of Continuity in Space, sculpted 1913, cast 1972
Futurist, supposedly a footballer, evokes a groundbreaking take on medieval armour
Jacqueline Marval, Bather in a Black Swimsuit, 1920-23 - this moves us into another century so well from, say, Boudin's depiction of bathers at Deauville [2]
Robert Delauney, Runners, c.1924 - post-Olympics, the heads echo the Olympic rings
Enzo Benedetto, Cyclist, 1926 - could as well be a 2020s portrayal
George Grosz, The Gymnast, c.1922 - the simplicity of the background architectural forms precede Mies van der Rohe's architecture in clear space
Futurist - unlike Paris 1924, a world not yet at peace with itself, shown in excellent art
Gino Severini, Danseuse V, 1914-15