While many know the Olympics as the ultimate sporting event, not too long ago, the legendary games once hosted art competitions as well—now, Pharrell Williams wants to bring them back.
When one thinks of the Olympics, images of lithe and powerful athletes, or physically demanding activities, often come to mind. Yet there was an interesting period when artists, writers, and even architects received gold, silver, and bronze medals in the historic games. From 1912 to 1952, lifting the mighty pen or paintbrush actually merited the same accolades as lifting weights. For over 30 years, the famous games awarded a total of 151 medals to creatives for their original works.
Discussions about this forgotten tradition have resurfaced over the years as people recall the Olympics’ storied history. Recently, American singer-songwriter, rapper, and designer Pharrell Williams (who also serves as the Men’s Creative Director of Louis Vuitton) brought the topic back to mainstream attention in the 2024 Paris Olympics. In an interview with AP News, Williams expressed his goal and hope of bringing back the games’ art competitions by 2028.
“We get to remind people that at one point, the Olympics actually had the arts as a section that ran all these competitions,” Williams explained before the grand Opening Ceremony. “Sculpture, architecture, visual arts. The idea we get to put the arts back in. Why not take this moment to bring awareness?”
But what exactly were these art competitions for, and what ever happened to them?
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Surprising Beginnings
Perhaps the reason why very little people know about the Olympics’ artistic history is because there aren’t many records to begin with—those that remain are few and far in between. Writer Richard Stanton is the only person to have written an entire book on the topic, as Joseph Stromberg reports in a 2012 feature for Smithsonian Magazine. To do that, Stanton had to dig through long-forgotten (and deteriorating) files within the International Olympic Committee (IOC) archives in Switzerland.
For the general public, there seems to be a dissonance between the arts and sports. Yet for the founder of the IOC and the modern games, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, creative pursuits were part of the plan from the very beginning.
“He was raised and educated classically, and he 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,” Stanton tells Stromberg in the article. “He felt that in order to recreate the events in modern times, it would be incomplete to not include some aspect of the arts.”
That said, it took a while for de Coubertin to find a spot for the arts while the Olympics was still growing. Fortunately, he remained steadfast in his belief that they should be in the games, and by the 1912 Stockholm Summer Olympics, these art competitions were in full swing. Their main goal was to award artists for original works that take inspiration from the Olympics. Whether they were poems, sculptures, music, or architectural designs, these submissions had to honor the games in some way.
A Creative Homage to Sports
According to Razmig Bedirian of The National, art competition winners include famous Luxembourg painter Jean Jacoby (who won two gold medals for his 1924 painting “Etude de Sport” and a 1928 drawing “Rugby”); and gold-medalist American athlete Walter Winans (who won the first Olympic gold medal for the arts through his bronze sculpture “An American Trotter”). Jack Butler Yeats, the brother of none other than Irish writer William Butler Yeats, was also among the established names to have won an Olympic medal (for his painting “The Liffey Swim,” which won silver in the 1924 Paris Olympics).
Even de Coubertin joined in, submitting works under pseudonyms in the early years of the art competitions, as he feared they wouldn’t get enough participants (he won a gold medal for his poem “Ode to Sport”).
Bedirian adds that only one woman earned a medal in the art competitions, and this was Finnish poet Aale Tynni. The writer won the gold medal under the literature category in the 1948 London Summer Olympics for her piece “Laurel of Hellas.”
Germany was a top-performer among the participating countries at the artistic games, with a total of 24 medals. Italy followed closely with an impressive 14 medals. Verlty Babbs of Artnet adds that by the art competitions’ final year (1948), Germany, France, and Italy stood at the top three positions among all other countries when it came to medals earned.
Lost Legacies And The End Of An Era
Participation in the art competitions of the Olympics skyrocketed in later years, but the games eventually came to an end in 1948, according to Babbs of Artnet and Bedirian of The National. The reason being that the IOC at the time wanted all Olympians to be amateurs—however, many submissions in later iterations of the competitions were coming from professional artists, which went against their core rule. The IOC agreed to strike out all 151 medals from the Olympic records—which is why they are no longer in each country’s medal count, reports Francesca Aton of ARTnews.
Sadly, many of the artistic submissions from the defunct art competitions were lost to time. Though there were people trying to bring back the competitions four years later (in the 1952 Olympics at Helsinki), the attempt was not successful.
What The Future Holds
Still, on what would be the 100th anniversary of the creative aspect of the games, the arts live on in different ways. Besides the thrilling Opening Ceremony, which features talents in the performing arts, the Olympics also has the Cultural Olympiad. The multidisciplinary artistic and cultural program encourages artists, troupes, non-profits, communities, sports clubs, and the like to take part in the games. They do this by providing them with thousands of free and public events that engage with their creativity, as well as showcase “the crossroads of art, sport and Olympic values.” This year, the program will run before and during the Games, until September 8, 2024.
As Tony Estanguet, president of the Paris 2024 Organizing Committee, so aptly puts it: “Sport and culture are sometimes pitted against each other, but I think they have a lot in common: performance, emotions, the quest for beauty of movement, but also, and above all, their ability to offer a diversity of disciplines that are all unique channels of expression for building oneself up, emancipating oneself, finding one’s path, feeling good […] It’s an opportunity to celebrate the values, meaning and diversity that sport and culture have in common.”
Banner photo “Rennpferde in Longchamp” (Racehorses in Longchamp) by Edgar Degas, via Wikimedia Commons.
