Sport ! Quand les musées font équipe

The initiative is transversal and interesting. The curators of public museums in the Ile-de-France region answered a questionnaire: what works do their institutions have on the theme of sports? The answer fills 180 pages and we can well imagine it is fragmented. Everyone played along, from the Louvre to the municipal museum in Colombes, including the Toy museum in Poissy and of course the national museum of Sports (musée national du sport). The works cover a wide range, from antique statues (wrestlers from the Louvre or the discus thrower from the Petit-Palais) up to the rugby T-shirt offered to Mac Orlan in 1967, and the subject is very stimulating since it touches on debatable questions such as sports and women, sports and race, etc. In looking at random we see the boules from Lyons, Stéphane Mallarmé’s racket, the silk number worn by Mimoun at the moment of his victory in the marathon of the Melbourne Olympics in 1956, a compression by César, illustrations by Daumier and beautiful portraits by Bernard Boutet de Monvel (who died in the same airplane accident as Marcel Cerdan). One single regret: after looking at this wonderful book the reader is dying to visit the museums; but the addresses of the museums are not given!

•Sport ! Quand les musées font équipe, a collective work, Somogy, 2009, 184 p., 29,50 €