Last week, I went to Southampton City Art Gallery for opening of A Century of Olympic Posters, the Victoria and Albert Museum’s touring exhibition. I caught it last year at the Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green, since when it has been Ironbridge in Shropshire, close to the historical home of the modern Olympic Games at Much Wenlock, and to Beijing. The preview evening was well-presented, with the organisers clearly recognising the opportunity for art/sport crossovers that such exhibitions can foster: as well as being able to see the exhibition, we were entertained by displays by local boxing and trampolining clubs, a rare chance for people to make a lot of noise and jump around in the usually hushed atmosphere of an art gallery.

The items in this excellent exhibition range from an 1851 advertisement for Robert Dover’s Olympick Games at Chipping Campden to posters from the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Most of the IOC’s Olympic Games are represented, including some of the Winter Olympics, with a thematic arrangement working alongside the more obvious chronological one. Apart from wishing that I had some of the posters for myself, three things struck me about the collection.

First, there is the old dilemma of presenting what is ultimately advertising material in an art gallery. The old distinctions between fine art and commercial art have probably been irrelevant since at least Toulouse-Lautrec. Even so it can still be odd to walk, as I did at Southampton, past a painting by James Tissot and a sculpture by Antony Gormley and into a quiet space devoted to bits of paper that were designed to be glued to billboards. The reverence that we are supposed to feel in art galleries clashes with the memories that the posters evoke. Some of them are great pieces of commercial art, and established artists including Roy Lichtenstein (LA 1984) and David Hockney (Munich 1972 and LA 1984) do for the Olympics what Lautrec did for Parisian nightclubs. Others, however, have little artistic merit – sorry, Athens 2004, but your piece here looked far too much like a standard Greek holiday poster. Either way, there is still something incongruous about looking at adverts that are framed and labelled as pieces of art.

My second impression was about just how unolympic the early posters were. The exhibition serves as a reminder that certain aspects of the Olympic Games that we now take for granted – the five ring logo, for example, and other aspects of the brand – simply didn’t exist in the competition’s early years. The fencing poster for the 1900 Paris Olympics makes no reference to the Olympic Games, for example, while the rings do not feature on any of the posters here until Los Angeles 1932, despite being used as early as Antwerp 1920. The exhibition is thus a great place to visit for anyone wanting an object lesson in the invention of tradition, or a reminder of how organisations are always evolving.

Finally, I was impressed that the exhibition’s curators had included some oppositional and alternative Olympic posters. The anti-Beijing 2008 designs, with the Olympic rings rendered in barbed wire or as the wheels of tanks, are not included, but a powerful Mexican poster from 1968 stands for the many anti-Olympic campaigns. In this, the campaigners for freedom of speech drew a man with his lips sealed with the Olympic rings. A Terrence Higgins Trust poster from the 1980s renders the rings as a collection of five coloured condoms. A colourful poster for the 1936 Workers’ Olympiad in Barcelona shows one of the forms that opposition to the Berlin Olympics took. The fact that the Barcelona poster includes a representation of a black competitor, something the official posters do not manage until 1960, suggests another interesting avenue for analysis.

The posters thus serve as a visual record of a changing aesthetics in the Olympic movement, and as views of what the Olympics – and their forerunners – were like at different moments in their history. This exhibition is not overly corporate, and is happy to make uncomfortable comparisons and contrasts. It also confirms the importance of visual artefacts as primary sources for the sports historian.

Comments

[Madelaine Smith]

Are we supposed to feel "reverence ... in art galleries"? Surely an emotional or intellectual response is more, or equally valid? Maybe that expected 'reverence' is why people stay away from art galleries and flock to sports events!

[Martin Polley]

Madelaine, I think you're right - intellectual, emotional, and political responses (such as my distaste for the 1936 Nazi posters in the Olympic collection) are far more important than 'reverence'. What I was getting at by using that word was the aura that galleries and museums still have about them as being repositories of 'secular relics' - despite all the great work being done to make them more accessible and more significant to their communities. Donald Horne writes about 'secular relics', and public art galleries as 'secular temples', in The Great Museum, his provocative critique of the heritage industry from 1984. For me, the combination of intimidating architecture, the quiet environment, and the idea that we are in the presence of greatness when we visit the gallery make it hard to completely lose the religious parallels.