Sport, in particular athletics, gives artists great opportunities, as well as huge challenges. Running, jumping, throwing, fighting, swimming – these ways of using the human body offer much to sculpt, paint, photograph or film. And that has been true since ancient times. The Olympic Games were not just about bringing the different Greek states together in friendly competition: athletics was also central to discovering how to portray people in motion, often in revolutionary ways. Although the ancient Egyptians played ballgames and other sports, depictions of these in their tombs are flat and static. Greece’s Games, by contrast, inspired a great artistic leap forward as sculptors and vase painters learned the language of speed.
The revival of the Olympics at the end of the 1800s coincided with the birth of modern art – and, just as classical artists were inspired by athletics, their modern counterparts have seen the physically elite through eyes liberated by cubism and besotted by pop. Here are the 20 greatest results, the best sporting artworks of all time.
20
The hugely muscled youth in this powerful little painting holds the heavy weights that ancient long jumpers used to improve their distance. You thrust these weights forward as you leapt for extra momentum. This image also shows that Greeks did sport in the nude.
19
Muybridge realised a camera could not just freeze but analyse motion, revealing the true complexity of human and animal movement. The artistic impact was immense: this revelation of the physical world would inspire cubists and futurists to fragment the visible into shards of perception.
18
Sprinters pulse in every muscle, pushing and snarling at one another in this hyperbolically physical, joyously caricatural painting. Barnes knew how it felt to compete at the top level. He was a professional American football player who took up his lifelong love of art after retiring. Here is the hurt.
17
Victorian respectability gives a group of female archers a good starching in this work by Frith, who loved crowd scenes. Heavy crinolines cover their bodies except for their heads and hands, which doesn’t seem particularly suited to this exacting sport. Yet these women take their archery seriously, perhaps imagining the target as a top-hatted man.
16
The director is one of today’s greatest visual artists. In this boxing movie, each image has the weight of a still photograph and the iconographic intensity of a Catholic altarpiece, gorily echoing Caravaggio, Giotto and the fight paintings of George Bellows, all underscored by a quotation from St John’s Gospel: “I was blind, but now I can see.”
15
This enigmatic illusionistic painting of a battered tin cup on what might be a changing room wall or a club noticeboard takes an ironic view of sport. Someone has scrawled “THE CUP WE ALL RACE 4” around it, a rueful comment on the gleaming medals and trophies which sportspeople devote their lives to winning.
14
Warhol may not have been the world’s biggest sports fan but he understood fame – and few athletes have been as charismatic or eloquent as Ali. After winning Olympic gold as Cassius Clay, he went on to bestride the globe, weaving together sport, life and language. Warhol, less capable with words, simply observes.
13
Flying machines, fast cars, electric light – there were many new technologies to excite artists in the early 20th century, but one of the most popular was speed-cycling. The Velodrome is a new kind of sports ground in the cubist eyes of Metzinger, where human and machine become one in a new type of heroism.
12
Blue swimmers glide and dance through space in Matisse’s frieze, made entirely of paper cutouts. Using the simplest, most childlike means, he is able to suggest so much. The colour and wave-like forms of the swimmers brilliantly merge the human body with water, as if swimmer and pool were one.
11
These fighters square up with style and aplomb, yet they were portrayed in a world in which what we call sport could equally well be a religious ritual, as in the ancient Minoan rite of leaping over bulls. Here, athletics as we know it is taking shape, developing in living colour.
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10
Renaissance art is not very big on sport as we know it, preferring jousts, hunting and dance to anything resembling modern (or Greek) athletics. However, in this ravishing red chalk drawing, Michelangelo’s nude archers are all firing passionately at the same male target, in a work that seems to fuse both classical art and Greek love.
9
The radiating circles of a target, familiar in Olympic archery and shooting, become profoundly mysterious in this conceptual masterpiece. By adding four casts of a face, Johns intensifies the feeling that his target is as much personal, even sexual, as athletic. And he hits the bullseye.
8
The Discus Thrower by Myron, 460-450BC
This legendary work is the purest, most perfect expression of ancient Greek art’s obsession with human motion. And it really is a legend – for Myron’s original is long lost. It is now known through a range of copies made in Roman times. The British Museum’s marble, which has an incorrectly restored head, was owned by the Emperor Hadrian.
7
Humans have long co-opted horses into sport, from chivalric tournaments to today’s Olympic equestrian events. This portrait of a renowned racehorse is one of the finest ever studies of an “athlete”. Highly strung, tensed with stored-up speed, superbly trained and a physical marvel, Whistlejacket deserves as much respect as any human runner.
6
So many images of sport, from The Discus Thrower onwards, are about motion and energy, but this painting captures a moment of rest. This solitary sculler, in a work subtitled Max Schmitt in a Single Scull, pauses on still water. Eakins captures the instant with uncanny precision and placidity, from the frozen sky to the photograph-like reflections and the pale rower’s philosophical isolation.
5
Beach pursuits, near naked and hedonistic, were being pioneered by artists, writers and the rich in the south of France when this was painted. Picasso depicts a wildly energetic ballgame, but not with the formality of classicism or the heroism of a Leni Riefenstahl. For him, this game is all about bodies being unleashed in savage anatomical freedom.
4
The Italian futurists worshipped speed, athleticism and all things new: their manifesto celebrates a car crash. But Boccioni, the movement’s greatest artist, is wise enough to keep his ecstatic studies of motion fixed on the human figure. Here, an impassioned footballer’s body explodes in shards and shafts of ethereal colour, each microsecond of motion echoing in a field of pulsing light.
Bronze medal
This film of Hitler’s 1936 Olympics is one of the greatest sporting artworks of all time – and that is terrifying. Starting among the ruins of ancient Olympia, Riefenstahl’s sensuous camera draws potent parallels between classical Greece and the ideals of physical perfection promoted by nazism and fascism in 1930s Europe. Beauty has never been as nauseating.
Silver medal
Banner subverts expectations of sporting art by using words instead of images to portray a runner at speed. It’s like Myron’s Discus Thrower rewritten by Sappho. But there is a deeper subversion: instead of praising a “perfect” body, the athlete she mythologises is a Paralympian. By far the most powerful and thought-provoking artwork to come out of the London Olympics, this is a meditation on what it means to watch athletics, as Banner translates her stream of thoughts into a prose poem with the force of sculpture.
The ancient Games were all-male but women held their own version at the sacred sporting site Olympia. Held every four years in honour of Hera, wife of Zeus, these games had just one event: running. This bronze of a little girl may depict an athlete in the Heraean Games. She wears a short dress, raising it to show her muscles. This was a pioneering way of portraying human energy and motion. You can detect an almost Egyptian flatness to it, yet there’s also something revolutionary in the sense of freedom she displays as she turns to look behind her. Ancient Greek images of sport push beyond mere physical excellence to suggest the infinite potential of human beings – to create new liberties, politics, ideas and destinies. The discovery of what great feats may be possible is personified here not by a discus-throwing man but by a girl sprinting ever onwards into the future.