From Géricault to Delaunay, an exhibition recounts the emergence and then the success of the sporting theme in art. Marmottan-Monet Museum is lining up, with many others in Paris and elsewhere, in the starting blocks.
A tour, supervised by Bertrand Tillier, professor of contemporary history at the Sorbonne, explores the theme of sport in Western art. Basically from the Second Empire to the Roaring Twenties. The approximately 160 selected works come from the National Sports Museum. But even more so from that of Orsay as well as the National Gallery of Art in Washington. A sign that we will find here less documents illustrating history than reasons for delight. Witness, for example, a large format by Courbet dated 1865 and taken from a private collection. It represents a woman rowing on a podoscaphe, the ancestor of the paddle. The course is structured into eight thematic sections. He does not synthesize. He doesn't synthesize…