If you’re already fed up with the Olympic Games in Paris, if you’re fed up with the whole sport, its ethics, its business, its oiled, hairless, sticky aesthetic, its synthetic plastic, and the words that go with it, soothing speeches on the universality of effort, the virtues of meeting, nothing on the drugs of record-obsessed people, nothing on the mistreatment of children force-fed the cult of victory, nothing on vicious trainers, rapist coaches and the hysterical, racist, homophobic public, if you’re fed up with all that, buy a book, just one, the one that will reconcile you with sport. It’s modestly called Sport in art, it is published by Citadelles & Mazenod; historians, professors, doctor in French literature, researcher at the CNRS, they are seven contributors under the direction of Yann Descamps and Georges Vigarello. The weight of the 380-page work will exempt you from your 40 morning push-ups, and the attention it will immediately attract will save you the placebo treatment prescribed by your doctor with this common sense advice: in case of side effects, consult a clairvoyant, it may be enough.
This book will not only reconcile you with sports, but also with beautiful themed books. On the cover, the official poster of the Munich Olympic Games in 1972, created by David Hockney. It represents a diver before the Bigger Splash. We can think what we want about the latest colorings of the “greatest living painter”, in the 1970s, the people responsible for the communication of the Olympic Games were up to date. Which is no longer at all the irresponsible people who ordered this fruit paste box cover that is the poster for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.
The authors of the Sport in art did not make a mistake about the symbol, this one boldly recalls that at the time when a commando of Palestinians from Black September was taking Israeli athletes hostage in the Olympic village, a handsome boy was frolicking in a Californian swimming pool under the brush of an English painter. Such is life, contrary to what Mr. Macron imagines: it is not his fine words that will prevent politics from bursting into the Olympic Games. This time again, vain words. As Mariette Darrigrand writes in The world July 23: “Our President of the Republic, for his part, has made enemies mainly with words.”
Eternal book
This book, the size of which, as you can see, paralyzes me, I must nevertheless summarize it: it is as much a journey through the history of art as it is a journey through the history of sport. You can get on the train at any page, it is sublime, the intelligence of the choice of masterpieces is on a par with the quality of their reproductions. Paper, ink, graphics, even the discretion of the blue-white-red, everything is subtle, scary to put your sweaty fingers on. It is better to be a bit of an artist when you present art. And a bit of a writer when you write. Because, in addition to this iconographic sum, there are texts. One that I take, I swear, at random: page 248, an article by Vigarello entitled “Leisure and the image of abandonment”.
The author evokes the possibility of another sport that appeared in the middle of the 19th century and of which realistic painting, in the so-called pompier style, testifies. It is the sport of relaxation, of letting go, of which swimming would be the religion. We do not hit the water, as the swimming teacher demands of Dora the sweet, we caress it, the water of the river, and far from exhausting ourselves in vain battles, we stay on the shore and fish with a line. It is the anti-sport, that of dreamers, “of deserved leisure, of relaxation, of abandonment, of self-appropriation.” Hence Edouard Manet and Winslow Homer, hence Georges Seurat and Frédéric Bazille.
It’s expensive, yes, 179 euros, but since you saved yourself a standing room behind a pole at the opening night, you can treat yourself to this eternal book.
Christophe Donner, writer
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