(Host) With the summer Olympics about to start, commentator and Vermont
Humanities Council executive director Peter Gilbert tells us about a
time not so long ago when athletic prowess was not the only thing to
receive medals at Olympic games.
(Gilbert) During the first half
of the twentieth century, the Olympic Games included competition not
only in sports but also in the Fine Arts, just as the ancient Olympic
Games did.
I confess that when I first learned this, I thought
what a great Monty Python sketch might be written about an international
Olympic art competition, with British artists facing off against
Italians, French against Germans. But the Olympic art competitions were a
serious matter. The modern Olympic Games were established as a way to
pursue peace, understanding, and compassion through cooperative
competition. The arts were added in the conviction that there’s a
relation between aesthetics and arts education on the one hand and moral
and social progress on the other.
During the Olympic Games held
between 1912 and 1948, medals were awarded in five arts categories:
literature, music, painting, sculpture, and architecture. Each piece of
artwork submitted had to be inspired by sports.
The arts
competition got off to a slow start in 1912, with only 35 artists
submitting their work. Nonetheless gold medals were awarded in all five
arts categories. The first significant art competition was at the 1924
Summer Olympics in Paris. Categories and rules differed at different
Olympiads. In 1928 four of the five fields of arts competition were
subdivided, thus creating more contests and more medals. The literature
category, for example, became three separate competitions – for
dramatic, epic, and lyric literature. The painting category was split
into three different competitions as well: paintings, drawings, and
graphic arts. The sculpture category was divided between statues and
reliefs or medals. Architecture came to include a town planning
category. In 1936 the music category became three events: orchestral,
instrumental, and solo or choral music. Musical entries were submitted
on paper. It wasn’t until 1936 that the musical compositions were
actually performed at the Olympics.
Prose entries in the
literature competition were limited to 20,000 words, about eighty
double-spaced typed pages; poetry submissions were limited to a thousand
lines. They could be in any language, provided they were accompanied by
either an English or French translation.
According to Richard
Stanton’s book entitled ‘The Forgotten Olympic Arts Competitions,’ a
total 147 medals were awarded in arts categories over the years. Germany
won a total of 24, Italy 14, France 13, and tied with nine medals each
were Austria, Denmark, Great Britain, and the United States.
One
could imagine that the art of fascist Italy, Germany, and Spain in the
late ‘twenties and the ‘thirties might be more martial in style than
that of other nations. (The difficulty of judging art from non-western
countries wasn’t a significant problem because in those years the
Olympics featured almost exclusively European nations.) But the arts
competitions ended in 1948 not due to issues of subjectivity in judging
art across cultures and nationalities, but because unlike the Olympic
amateur athletes, the Olympic artists were generally professionals.