Art exhibition tells stories of 1924 Paris Olympics

An art exhibition will reflect on the last Olympics to be held in Paris a century ago, as the Games return to the French capital this summer.

Paris 1924: Sport, Art and the Body will use art, film and photography to tell stories about the momentous sporting event, at Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum.

Curators say the exhibition will allow visitors to “explore how the modernist culture” of Paris “shaped the future of sport and the Olympic Games we know and love today”.

They say that the 1924 Games was a “breakthrough that forever changed attitudes towards sporting achievement and celebrity, as well as body image and identity, nationalism and class, race and gender”.

The exhibition will highlight how international artists working across different disciplines – including prominent modernist artists such as Pablo Picasso, Diego Rivera and Umberto Boccioni – were engaged with themes of the sporting body.

It will present these works of art in dialogue with classical sculpture, posters, fashion, film, photography, sporting objects, advertising and more, to demonstrate how sport captured the imagination of visual culture across different forms.

The achievements of Cambridge University students, who won 11 Olympic medals for Great Britain in 1924, including sprinter Harold Abrahams whose story inspired the award-winning film Chariots Of Fire, will also be celebrated in the exhibition.

Paris 1924: Sport, Art and the Body will open to the public on Friday July 19 and run until November 3.