Sporting Art for the Global Age? ‘Edition Olympia’ and the 1972 Munich Olympics

‘Edition Olympia’, a collection of art posters commissioned from international artists for the 1972 Olympics in Munich, offers a fascinating case study of interactions between art, sport and politics. The art posters are instances of contemporary sporting art as well as a vehicle for the promotion of the games and a positive image abroad of the host nation as outward-looking and cosmopolitan. An account of the project’s conceptualization and the motivations behind it, is followed by close examination of individual posters which focuses on sports imagery, representations of the human body and the stylistic choices made by the artists, from expressionism to Pop to geometric abstraction. Presenting visions of the spectacular nature of contemporary sport, often fused with the dynamism of image, colour and form, the posters offer a greater and more astonishing variety of formal features and visual languages than previously acknowledged. Largely de-localized and de-nationalized, the posters’ visual languages play into an aesthetic internationalism which in turn was bound up with a cultural and political internationalism that wished to present a positive image of West Germany on the global stage, attuned to Western conceptions of modernism and democracy.