To coincide with the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games, held in Paris for the first time in 100 years, the Musée Marmottan Monet will be presenting an exhibition titled “En Jeu! Artists and Sport (1870-1930)” from 4 April to 1 September 2024. It will look back at the visual history of sport between 1870 and 1930 via more than a hundred major artworks from public and private European, American and Japanese collections (Musée National du Sport, Nice; Musée d’Orsay; Centre Pompidou; Musée Fabre, Montpellier; National Gallery of Art, Washington; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, etc.).

From Impressionism to Cubism, the exhibition will show how sport and sportspeople were made into icons of modernity and the avant-garde. It will explore the ethical challenges and aesthetic aspects of how sports were perceived by artists such as Monet, Degas, Caillebotte, Toulouse-Lautrec, Eakins, Richer, Maillol, Rodin, Bellows, Lhote, Delaunay, Metzinger and Gromaire, including elitist sports such as horse-riding, sailing and fencing and age-old sports such as wrestling, boxing and ball games. It will also look at the metaphorical meanings of the heroic figure of the artist as sportsperson, characterized by determination, stamina and a form of resistance.

Chief curator: Érik Desmazières, director, Musée Marmottan Monet
Scientific curator: Bertrand Tillier, professor of contemporary history, Paris – Panthéon Sorbonne University; co-director, Centre d’Histoire du XIXe Siècle; director, Éditions de la Sorbonne
Associate curator: Aurélie Gavoille, curatorial assistant, Musée Marmottan Monet