Olympic Gold For Art? Bring It On!

The modern Olympic games began in 1898. Between the years of 1912 and 1948 the Olympics not only awarded medals for athletic achievement but also gave medals for artistic achievement.
Medals were awarded in oil painting, watercolor painting, sculpture, architecture, music and literature. These events were judged and the artists received the exact same medals as the athletes.

At the 1932 L.A. Games, the arts component had 540 entries from 24
countries. No chants of "USA" accompanied the competition. Teams of judges
quietly evaluated the works, all of which had to have a sports theme.Most
were in the visual arts and were exhibited at the Los Angeles Museum of
History, Science and Art (now the Natural History Museum), where 384,000
members of the public viewed them, according to the official report on the
Games. -David Colker - LA Times

That is pretty fucking cool. The modern world seems to value specialization much more these days, and the idea of combining the arts and athletics seems anathema to most Americans. It was not so for the modern Olympic Games founder.

The arts competitions were not part of the first modern Olympics in 1896.
But the founder of the revived Games, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, had long
toyed with the idea.
Writing in a French sports magazine in 1891, he proposed an event consisting of a 14-kilometer race and written essay. Not simultaneously. That event never made it into the Games, but De Coubertin pressed on, declaring in a 1906 speech that it was time to "reunite in the bonds of legitimate wedlock a long-divorced couple -- muscle and mind."
The arts competition debuted at the 1912 Games in Stockholm where an
American, Walter Winans, won the gold for sculpture. But he didn't stop there.
Winans also took silver in the 100-meter team running single shots
competition, thus becoming the only Olympian in history to win both for
sculpture and shooting.

This is an image of Lee Blair's niece, Jeanne Chamberlain, holding the gold medal her uncle won in the 1932 Olympics for a watercolor painting.

The complete LA Times story can be read here.

It is once again time to join these two worlds. It is a great source of consternation to find that, as an artist and art lover, the art world sees sport and athletics as incongruous with artistic temperament. The sports world, on the other hand, seems to find the arts a laughable joke, completely incompatible with an athletic mind-set. The well-rounded human should have an appreciation for both these forms of human expression and human achievement. It is a difficult thing to try to change people's minds.