Robert Delaunay, The Runners, c.1924. The National Museum of Serbia, Belgrade.
A century before Paris 2024, the city hosted a game-changing Jeux Olympiques. These 1924 Olympics were the first truly international games, the first with an Olympic Village, and with radio commentary. Yet what really made them special was Paris, crucible of art, jazz and fashion, in a brief period of prosperity between two World Wars. Artists and fashion-designers were inspired by sport; sport made icons of its athletes; calls for Classicism’s return to order came up against radically new ways of representing the body by the Cubists, Futurists, and by photographers.
The Fitzwilliam Museum is home to a major exhibition on these Games. Its co-curator, Professor Caroline Vout, Director of Cambridge’s Museum of Classical Archaeology, talks to us not only about the look of the Games, their publicity, venues and athletes, but about their societal place and impact – about the intersection of sport and art in ways that shaped celebrity and nationhood and challenged ideas of race, gender and body-image.
Paris 1924: Sport, Art and the Body is at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, until 3 November 2024.
Proceeds from ARTscapades ticket sales benefit museums, galleries and other arts-based organisations and projects.
This is an online event hosted on Zoom which can be watched live, or on-demand for one month afterwards. You will receive your link to access the event in your email confirmation and the on-demand link after the event ends.