A fragment of misty grey film opens this enthralling exhibition. It shows tennis divas in flapper dresses swanning ceremonially round a stadium, and sprinters leaping forwards with greyhound grace beneath the lingering smoke of a starter’s pistol. Swimmers cut through pools like elegant blades. Cross-country runners hurdle walls then vanish from sight.
Two wrestlers lock limbs with such equal force they appear temporarily motionless, still as a statue. And right beside them, as if bodying forth into our space, is their exact counterpart in three dimensions: a cast of an ancient Greek sculpture made thousands of years ago. Art and reality – the two are so identical as to make you draw breath, and think again about ancient and modern, classical perfectionism and actual reality. Time spools back and forth in the gallery.
Paris 1924 – timed to coincide with next week’s return of the Olympics to the French capital – is a revelation from first to last. You soon begin to realise that those Games were a turning point not just for the history of athletics, but for race and class, politics, money and celebrity, and for their expression in modern art.
The show fizzes with surprises. Here is Alexander Calder’s lithe wire figure of the American tennis champion Helen Wills balancing on one toe to return a ball, like a sketch in midair, and Diego Rivera’s colossal, heroising pastel of her face. Here is the steel-ridged football boot of the great Uruguayan wing-half José Andrade, alongside portrait photographs that could have been taken at last week’s Euros.
The Flying Finn, as Paavo Nurmi was known, haunts the show from the start. Born to a poor family in Turku, he left school at 12 to provide for his parents but was so gifted he won five gold medals in 1924, setting two world records for running in the space of a single hour. His gaunt and staring face – he rarely spoke and was described as closed, fanatical and cold by one French newspaper, and as living “outside humanity” by another – looks out from films, full-length portraits and several sculptures, including a fierce bronze by the overlooked German artist Renée Sintenis, in which Nurmi’s body powers forwards as the tool of a formidable mind.
Period photographs show the Olympic village as a collection of wooden huts with bread and jam for breakfast. Track and field events took place in the manufacturing district of Colombes; the swimming pool was even further from the city centre, and tickets were priced for those with cars, not working-class spectators. A subtle yet riveting theme, here, concerns money and background.
Lord Burghley, of Eton, Magdalene College and the Conservative party, was 19 when he competed in the hurdles in 1924 (he went on to win gold in Amsterdam four years later). James Rockefeller, future billionaire, took gold in Paris for rowing. Cambridge University produced the victorious all-rounders Harold Abrahams and old Harrovian Douglas Lowe. But the only British gold for swimming was won by Blackpool’s Lucy Morton, the daughter of a Cheshire groom; administrators were so surprised they had to scramble to find a union jack.
Morton is – extraordinarily – photographed surging up for air in the final moments as a crowd of men hang over the side, practically falling in the water. It is not obvious where the unnamed photographer is positioned, except that it seems almost impossible to have taken such a dramatic and rapid closeup a year before Leica transformed the speed and mobility of the modern camera.
And how to represent bodies in motion becomes the show’s compelling question. Should the athletes appear literally Olympian – wreathed in laurels, raising their naked arms in heroic if frozen salute – or wheeling forward, tousled in 20s shorts, with a javelin? A staggering poster shows a winter Olympics bobsleigh shooting down an Alpine slope, dwarfed beneath a gigantic eagle, a French tricolore in its talons. A viaduct completes the imperial, but entirely immobile, propaganda.
A bobsleigh appears in the very next gallery, next to Umberto Boccioni’s famous statue Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, supposedly striding forward in dynamic flails and thrusts. There is a lovely affinity in the dark metal, but both feel bogged down and static. Compare, instead, the startling contrast between George Grosz’s drawing of a velodrome, spectators rearing to one side as the bicyclist hurtles past in a blur round a disappearing track; it far exceeds the feeble record of motion in the newsreel alongside.
Robert Delaunay’s Runners push straight at you, all bright stripes and scissoring limbs. The metronomic switchback of tennis gets its best representation in André Lhote’s semi-abstract fan of flashing shapes. Picasso’s undulating dancer, for the Olympic Ball, is conjured out of a single unbroken line. Indeed, a perfect emblem for this show might be his drawing on the front page of a newspaper that turns photographs of athletes into classical figures with a few suave doodles.
Daphne du Maurier’s future husband was thrown off the British bobsleigh. The bestselling US paediatrician Dr Spock won gold for rowing. This is the Olympics of Eric Liddell, who broke the 400m record but did not compete in the 100m because he was a devout Christian and the heats were on a Sunday.
A beautiful sightline allows a sculpture of Liddell to appear against the distant sight of him running with his teammates in Hugh Hudson’s 1981 film Chariots of Fire: art expanded through art. Such connections are everywhere available through the superb curating of Caroline Vout and Christopher Young, respectively Cambridge professors of classics and modern and medieval German studies.
Constantly alive to the relationship between art and life, between image and audience, they present all kinds of unfamiliar sights. Here are portraits of Johnny Weissmuller, Austro-Hungarian athlete and future Hollywood Tarzan; and here are vicious cameos of his nose and lips. Here is William DeHart Hubbard’s letter telling the folks at home that he plans to become the first Black Olympian champion in an individual event, which he achieved, and here are the predictable racist caricatures. You could win medals, but not people’s hearts.
Lucy Morton returned to Blackpool circus for a puny salary (her contract is here). Nurmi, who ran with a stopwatch in his hand, was forced out of longer races by his own nation. Andrade, most desperate of all, died penniless and alcoholic in a Montevideo asylum. It is not the least of this riveting experience, with its brilliant interweaving of high art and living document, avant-garde photograph and cigarette card, that it should consider the athletes’ own lives.
Olympic athletes can appear timeless – look at the boxers bandaging their hands on the Grecian urn, or the wrestlers in film and sculpture. What you see here happened in ancient Greece and modernist Paris and will happen all over again there in the coming weeks. So perhaps the magnificent classical figure of the Discobolus that ends this show should come as a warning. For that staggering figure, compressing all his rippling power into one fling of the discus, would of course become the emblem of Hitler’s 1936 Berlin Olympics.
• Paris 1924: Sport, Art and the Body is at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, until 3 November
