En jeu ! Les artistes et le sport

Lecture presented by Aurèlie Gavoille, curator of the Musée Marmottan Monet, and associate curator of the exhibition. On the occasion of the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the first to be held in the capital in a hundred years, the Musée Marmottan Monet will be presenting the exhibition "En jeu! Artists and Sport (1870-1930)".

The museum will trace the visual history of sport between 1870 and 1930 through more than 150 significant works and documents from public and private collections in Europe and the United States.

From Impressionism to Cubism, the lecture will show how sport, sports and sportsmen and sportswomen became the subjects of modernity and the avant-garde. At the crossroads of the 19th and 20th centuries, while Pierre de Courbertin was inventing a contemporary version of the ancient Olympiads, sport was undergoing a series of mutations that artists were taking full measure of.

From its aristocratic and English origins in the 19th century, sport was gradually acculturated across the European continent and as far afield as the United States, democratizing both spectacle and practice, to become a mass leisure activity at the beginning of the following century.

The exhibition will explore the ethical and aesthetic implications of the way sports were viewed, not only by Monet, Degas, Caillebotte, Toulouse-Lautrec and Eakins, or Richer, Maillol and Rodin, but also by Bellows, Lhote, Delaunay, Metzinger and Gromaire, at the convergence of elite practices (riding, sailing, fencing) and archaic ones (wrestling, boxing, ball games), exploring the metaphorical meanings of the heroic figure of the artist as sportsman, characterized by determination, endurance and a form of resistance.