Clodagh Finn: We need a true Olympian effort to give the arts the support it needs

While we may never reinstate art as an Olympic sport, the opening of a Jack B Yeats exhibition at the weekend gives us the perfect platform to evoke a time when it was, and imagine a future that puts culture at its centre

Painter Jack B Yeats won the first Olympic medal for the Irish Free State when he was awarded silver for art in the 1924 Games in Paris.

The timing has the precision of an Olympic event.

Just as the Paralympics draws to a close this weekend, the baton will pass to another Irish Olympian, who will shine at the National Gallery of Ireland, where the biggest collection of his work in 50 years goes on display.

It might have passed a little under the radar, but painter Jack B Yeats won the first Olympic medal for the Irish Free State when he was awarded silver for art in the 1924 Games in Paris.

Art was an Olympic event from 1912 to 1948 and, given the battering suffered by the arts sector over the last 18 months, it seems like a good idea to make it one again.

We could take the cue from previous Games when artists were invited to submit work inspired by sport in one of five categories — architecture, literature, music, painting, and sculpture.

Or perhaps we could add a few new categories to celebrate the slow and long-awaited reopening of a particularly hard-hit cultural sector.

What better time to recall Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the International Olympic Committee, who introduced art as an Olympic sport because he hoped to “reunite in the bonds of legitimate wedlock a long-divorced couple — muscle and mind”?

He wanted to close the gap between sport and art by reviving the aesthetic prowess of the original games of ancient Greece where poetry and music competitions ran alongside chariot racing and wrestling.

Of the 150 medals awarded for art in the first half of the last century, two went to Ireland. In 1924 — the first time Ireland competed as a national delegation — Jack B Yeats presented two oil paintings, The Liffey Swim and Before The Start, featuring three jockeys at the starting line of a race, to the Summer Olympics in Paris.

He won silver for The Liffey Swim, becoming the first Olympian of the Free State in the process.

More than two decades later, Meath-born landscape artist Letitia Marion Hamilton won a bronze medal for art at the London Olympics in 1948.

It is an ideal time to remember those artistic Olympian victories as the gap between sport and culture has never appeared to be so pronounced.

More than that, at times it seemed as if the Government was even pitting one against the other. And in that artificial battle, sport scored a resounding victory over the live events sector.

How else are we to interpret the figures — some 40,000 fans were allowed in Croke Park for finals and over 20,000 at semi-finals, while outdoor gigs were limited to 500 fans in pods?

When it came to pilot events, sport won out over culture by a very large margin. According to one estimate, there were almost 200 pilot sporting events and fewer than 10 cultural events.

Today, the focus will shift to the great reopening plan but, when the dust settles, it is worth revisiting those numbers to see how they reflect the Government’s attitude to culture and the arts.

The sector has a dedicated and vocal supporter in Arts Minister Catherine Martin, yet that was not enough to put sporting and cultural pilot events on an equal footing.

Why was that? The benefits of sport — playing and watching it — are absolutely undisputed. But so too is the thrill of theatre or the invigorating thrum of live music rippling through your body. Surveys confirm that. Over 60% of Irish people consider the arts essential for their wellbeing.

More than that, they are profitable, despite the perception. According to Theatre Forum figures, more people attend paid arts events in Ireland every year than attend GAA championship matches.

Even if the unequal divvying out of pilot events does not reflect a perceived gap between sport and culture at the heart of the Government, it is timely to celebrate Jack B Yeats, a man who is both Olympian and artist.

We have seen in these recent glory days how an Olympic medal can boost the national spirit. Remember the scenes of jubilation when our winning athletes arrived home from Tokyo. The celebrations for boxing medalists Kellie Harrington and Aidan Walsh and our six magnificent rowers were a much-needed boost during a difficult summer.

The celebrations for Olympic gold medal winner Kellie Harrington and our other medalists were a much-needed boost during a difficult summer. Picture: Sam Boal / RollingNews.ie

We will throw our hats in the air again when the Paralympians come home. At the time of writing, the celebratory headlines were trumpeting the happy news that paracyclists Katie-George Dunlevy and Eve McCrystal had won a sensational gold medal, while hand-cyclist Gary O’Reilly took bronze.

We can add those triumphant photographs to those of Jason Smyth, Ellen Keane, and Nicole Turner and look forward to the homecoming. But the Olympic celebration doesn’t have to end there.

While we may never reinstate art as an Olympic sport (more’s the pity), the opening of a Jack B Yeats exhibition at the weekend gives us the perfect platform to evoke a time when it was, and imagine a future that puts culture at its centre.

The value of that can’t be overstated. As Mark O’Brien, executive director/co-director of the Abbey Theatre, so eloquently put it: “Arts events facilitate the safe gathering of people in shared explorations of what it is to be human and what it is to dream, aspire, and challenge. They create empathy. They help create communal bonds, they create spaces to challenge perspectives and explore our humanity.”

He is right when he says that the arts are going to play a huge part in the restoration of communities and societies in the coming years.

“The arts sector know well how to create joy, to create release, to create hope,” says O’Brien. “Now, more than ever, these are the spaces we need. This is not about ‘the arts’. This is about us all.”

While the fight to save Electric Picnic gobbled up the headlines, the real battle over the coming months will be about supporting the tens of thousands of people who have the talent, the creativity, and the skill to take part in that important reconstruction.

Public investment in the arts reached a record €130m this year, but the Arts Council has warned that Covid-19 could transform cultural practice as we know it.

The sector, it says, finds itself torn between hope and optimism on the one hand, and the necessity in the next number of months to assess the structural damage which has been wrought by the crisis.

The extent of that damage is not yet clear.

“While no Arts Council-funded organisations have closed, it is as yet unclear how many individual artists have left to pursue careers in other sectors,” said an Arts Council report.

It’s interesting to note that a year before Jack B Yeats won an Olympic medal, his brother William B Yeats won the Nobel Prize “for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation”.

We need an Olympian effort now to support the artists who, in turn, sustain us. The spirit of a whole nation is at stake.