Poet, Painter, Sprinter, Spy
How the 1968 Cultural Olympiad brought the Cold War to Mexico City
Yevgeny Yevtushenko performs at the Arena México.
Overview
This book, represented by the Calligraph agency, tells the global history of the 1968 Cultural Olympiad: one of the last major international battles of the Cultural Cold War. As the first Olympic host in Latin America, Mexico City organized a ten-month art festival with 97 participating nations, inviting celebrities from the U.S. (Martha Graham, Duke Ellington, Arthur Miller…), the U.S.S.R. and its allies (Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Jerzy Grotowski, the Bolshoi Ballet…), and the Spanish-speaking world (David Alfaro Siqueiros, Julio Le Parc, Octavio Paz…). Organizers asked these artists to address the youth of the world—never suspecting that, by the time the program was underway, the youth would be in open revolt. This is the story of how those artists, traveling from cities in turmoil to the international stage of the games, responded to the call. It’s also the story of how the CIA infiltrated the events—and inadvertently exposed itself—by sending the young case officer Philip Agee to Mexico City, on what would become his final mission before betraying the agency.
Archives
The research for my work on the Olympic arts, made possible thanks to two summer fellowships, draws from the Olympic Studies Centre in Lausanne, the Musée Géo-Charles in Échirolles, the Département des Manuscrits and Intitut de France in Paris, the NYPL, the LoC, and the Beinecke Library at Yale. Having started with an interest in the Olympic Art Competitions of 1912-1948, I collected 22 out of 30 medal-winning works of Olympic literature (as well as a few notable losers) and hundreds of images of other Olympic artworks. Most recently, I've been investigating the jury lists for the Paris 1924 Games, which advertise the participation of celebrity artists like Stravinsky, Sargent, Valéry, and Wharton--likely with some exaggeration. I'm also working on creating my own archive to publish and share with other researchers, based on digitized records of the Olympic art entries.
Jean Giraudoux was a judge in all five events for the Olympic Art Competitions in 1924.
This interactive ArtMap shows the provenance of Olympic artworks from national teams (gray) and from artists' home cities (orange).
Digital Humanities
To discover what 3,000 Olympic artworks can tell us about modernism and twentieth-century culture, digital research techniques are a necessity. This project uses a database of Olympic entries edited from sports record-keepers, Olympic exhibition catalogues, and other historical scholarship to calculate statistics concerning both the artworks and the artists. That database is also the basis for "Pentathlon of the Muses," a website in development that will allow scholars of twentieth-century culture and the general public alike to familiarize themselves with the Olympic arts and to track, via the interactive "ArtMap," the circulation of submissions through the years. Read more here.