A meeting of muscles and minds
Stockholm 1912 was the first Olympic Games to include an arts competition, a cultural event that linked the modern era with the ancient Games and became a feature of the Games for years afterwards.
The last arts competition was held at London 1948. By Helsinki 1952, it had been replaced with the Cultural Olympiad, a four-year artistic and cultural programme encompassing a variety of disciplines, which ran between each Olympic Games. Its purpose was to explore the links between art and sport and the values they share, underscoring the importance of art and culture to the Games.
Held in parallel with the sporting competitions, the arts competition at Stockholm 1912 comprised five categories collectively known as the “Pentathlon of the Muses”: architecture, literature, music, painting and sculpture. Like the athletes, artists were awarded gold, silver and bronze medals for their efforts. At later Games, subcategories were introduced, such as literature in a drama, lyric or epic; orchestral and instrumental music; solo and chorus singing; drawing, graphic arts and painting; and sculpture, reliefs, medals, plaques and medallions.
The main motivation behind staging arts competitions was to inspire discussion and promote ideas among athletes and spectators alike. The competition was enthusiastically promoted by Pierre de Coubertin, who saw Olympism as being underpinned by the training of the body and the cultivation of intellect and spirit. His dream was to create a society in which artists and athletes could draw inspiration from one another.
That spirit of Olympism has its roots in the ancient Olympic Games, where athletes would come together with philosophers, scholars, poets, musicians, sculptors and leading figures to showcase their myriad talents.