The exhibition En Jeu! in Paris showcases art inspired by sports in the 19th century.

Thanks to this fascinating exhibition, we reached out to its curator, Aurélie Gavoille. She has selected her top five favorite works from the exhibition specifically for the print magazine Sport in Art. You’ll find out which works she chose in the upcoming issue, dedicated to the Olympics, coming out on September 9.

All through the 19th century, organized sport spread out from England across the European continent and as far as the United States, crossing borders, social spaces, and cultural identities.  At the turn of the 1840s, the sport was still an elite activity, mainly practiced by the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, its early international expansion in part fuelled by the Anglomania of the day. It started to become more democratic in the second half of the century. Whether enjoyed for sheer physical effort or as a spectacle, it appealed to masses in search of new leisure activities to fill the free time they had begun to gain from the disciplined rhythms of work and rationalized productivity. 

This social transformation of the status of sport – reflected in France by the shift from the term sportsman to sportif – naturally attracted the curiosity of artists, starting with painters and engravers, but also sculptors and then photographers working for the booming illustrated press.  They recorded its worlds and its rules, its transformations and its forms, identifying its champions with their expressive bodies as new heroes, emblematic of the age of the stopwatch. In the age of naturalism and Impressionism, they drew on these facets of modern life to create a poetic vision of contemporary society. The avant-gardes of the early twentieth century – Fauvism, Cubism, and  Futurism – continued to explore this aspect of modernity. Aesthetic issues now intersected with the resolutely political issues of art of competition and prowess, which Pierre de Coubertin seized upon to found the Olympic Games in 1896, thus reinventing the Ancient Greek tradition of the Olympiads.  

The frequency with which sporting subjects were depicted in art from the 1870s to the 1930s is of interest, too, for what it says about the values attached to these individual or collective practices in the imaginations of artists, some of whom were themselves, seasoned sportsmen and women.  They themselves faced tensions and resistance in the effort to have their art accepted and eventually approved; they had to redouble their efforts, to fight until they achieved victory. No doubt part of their curiosity and fascination for the sport came from this identification with the qualities of determination, endurance, and resistance embodied by sportsmen and women, which made not only the wrestler, the boxer, or the athlete but also the regatta competitor, the sculler and the runner into metaphorical self-portraits of the painter or sculptor and their struggles. These too had their own form of heroism. 

Among the masters featured in the exhibition who celebrate artists' interest in sports, both in terms of modernity and societal changes, are Pierre Bonnard, Gustave Courbet, Robert Delaunay, Théodore Géricault, Claude Monet, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Auguste Rodin, and Paul Signac. The exhibition showcases over one hundred and eighty significant works from public and private collections in Europe and the United States.

The exhibition En jeu! Artists and Sport: 1870-1930 has received the “Cultural Olympiad” label from the Paris 2024 Organizing Committee. The Cultural Olympiad is a multidisciplinary artistic and cultural program offering various events throughout France until September 2024.

The text was provided by Aurélie Gavoille, the curator of the exhibition, who spent three years working on it alongside Érik Desmazières, director of the Musée Marmottan Monet, and Bertrand Tillier, a professor of modern history at the Panthéon-Sorbonne University.