En jeu ! Artists and sport (1870-1930)

From 4th April to 1^st September 2024, sport and art become one. To mark the Cultural Olympiad, the Musée Marmottan-Monet is offering a new look at sport during the Second Empire with the exhibition En jeu ! Artists and sport (1870-1930).

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.).

Home to an impressive collection and the mecca of Impressionism, the Musée Marmottan Monet depicts, through its works, a portrait of the society of the second half of the 19^th century, which gradually took pleasure in taking advantage of its free time to pursue sporting and leisure activities on land or water. These new activities, the majority of which were initiated under the Second Empire, held a key place in the production of the Impressionist group, where natural elements and Modernity combined. Certain Impressionist paintings from the museum’s collections and some of Monet’s sketch pads, preserved in-situ, bear witness to the growing popularity of such pursuits.

Louise Abbéma, Pierre Bonnard, Antoine Bourdelle, Gustave Courbet, Honoré Daumier, Robert Delaunay, Maurice Denis, Thomas Eakins, Émile Friant, Théodore Géricault, Max Klinger, Aristide Maillol, Claude Monet, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Auguste Rodin, Félicien Rops, Paul Signac, Alfred Sisley, and Kees Van Dongen are some of the masters gathered here to celebrate the interest of artists in the subject of sports, both through the prism of Modernity and societal change in the exhibition En jeu ! Artists and sport (1870-1930).