CAMBRIDGE — This past summer, the Olympic Games took place in Paris. Paris 1924: Sport, Art and the Body at the Fitzwilliam Museum reminds us that they were in the city 100 years ago too, in an unlovely suburb, where the main stadium was sited next to a pumping station (something that images of the time often did their best to disguise).
This exhibition is more than a dull exercise in documentation, though it does feel under-energized, and almost dutiful, for a good portion of the way through. In fact, you might wonder whether the show is about dash, speed, verve, and athletic physique at all. Much of the stuff is displayed in the kinds of boxy, glazed cabinets that reek of antiquated museum habits. Far too many medals, bits of old ribbon, old programs, and old photographs are on view. Yes, it gets off to a very sluggish start. Why though?
Because, in part at least, the organizers seem to have been too pleased to discover that so many of these handsome competitors came from Cambridge, and the Cambridge colleges have been very eager to lend old memorabilia. It’s a dreary compact, with more than a shameless whiff of self-congratulation.
Then, two thirds of the way round the track, the exhibition hits its stride. The space opens up. The themes promised by the title start to come into their own. All those issues that emerge from athletes being displayed as heroic on the world’s stage begin to take shape: how artists respond to sport; how the fashion world sits up and takes notice; how propagandists and filmmakers make hay with glamorous bodies.
Take the case of Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller, for example. What a magnificent hunk of a performer he was! Weissmuller, a five-time gold medal winner, became a Hollywood idol, starring in 12 Tarzan films. In a 1932 photograph by George Hurrell (not in the exhibition) for the Los Angeles Olympics Games, he posed as a Greek statue of a discus thrower. Unfortunately, he was so gorgeous to behold in this image that Nazi propagandists saw him as the embodiment of the ideal Aryan male. His physical perfection made him fodder for the Fascist propaganda machine.
Artists pick up on split-second marvels of movement — Alexander Calder, in a wire sculpture of wonderful economy, shows us the tennis star Helen Wills in 1927, lunging forward and down to parry a shot, leg flung back out, all poise and nerve. In “The Liffey Swim” (1923), Jack B. Yeats, that flickery expressionist and Olympic medalist, captures the excitement of the crowd leaning over the River Liffey in Dublin, cheering on the swimmers competing in the annual race.
Sport at the Olympics put strengthened and emboldened bodies on parade: In Jacqueline Marval’s “Bather in a Black Swimsuit” (1920–23), a woman who could otherwise be vacationing becomes a sleek and prideful athlete suffused with the spirit of the Olympiad. At last, we have become onlookers at something really special: all that beauty, balance, and symmetry — the power of bodies in motion to enthrall.
Paris 1924: Sport, Art and the Body continues at the Fitzwilliam Museum (Trumpington Street, Cambridge, England) through November 3. The exhibition was curated by Caroline Vout and Christopher Young.
