All I can imagine is a Pythonesque sketch of early-20th Century artists sitting at easels -- maybe stretching their canvases -- in a sports field, waiting expectantly for the starter pistol. An anticipatory quiet descends over the stadium. Paint! A frantic mixing of paint and blur of brush stokes, as the artists get underway. The crowd goes wild as the Dutch team get down their first layers of colour. Scenes of panic as the Americans trip and their easels tumble to the ground; paint and turpentine flowing over the track. The French Impressionists, who stalled out of the gate mixing Absinthe, make a sudden surge as their choices of colour and shape materialise on the canvas. It's all to play for when, all of a sudden, the surrealist cubists come out of nowhere and win by, what I think, is a nose.
Weird to see this here. My grandfather is listed ('36 gold in composition). If I remember his diaries correctly, he seemed to appreciate it mostly because it meant he had beaten the other German composers.
My great grandfather competed in painting in '32. He's a piece of family history I think of often in the "what-if" sense, a not-so-remarkable painter, born the year after Hitler.
To be fair, the competition seems to have massively emphasised the architecture of sporting facilities. 25 of the 28 medals were awarded for what are definitely sporting facilities, and the other 3 - a bullfight arena and two municipal parks - are at least in adjacent areas.
If that's the emphasis of the competition, it's not too surprising that the Olympic stadium or Olympic Village would do well, even with completely objective judges.
