Carnegie, Milwaukee museums wager art for Super Bowl

Many people this weekend will be betting substantial amounts of cash on who will win Super Bowl… Many people this weekend will be betting substantial amounts of cash on who will win Super Bowl XLV. But for two art museums, the winner’s prize won’t be money — it will be a painting.

The Carnegie Museum of Art is holding a bet with the Milwaukee Art Museum over whose football team will win the Super Bowl this Sunday — the Steelers or the Packers. The losing region’s art museum will temporarily loan a coveted piece of artwork to the winning region’s museum.

If the Steelers win on Sunday, the Carnegie Museum of Art will receive a much-desired painting to complete their impressionist collection: “Boating on the Yerres” by Gustave Caillebotte. The artist is a French painter from the late 19th century whose work is rare, and despite the fact that the Carnegie Museum of Art has an extensive collection of impressionist paintings, they do not have any paintings by Caillebotte.

“He’s very desirable to us,” the Carnegie Museum of Art’s representative Ellen James said.

If Wisconsin’s Green Bay Packers win the title, on the other hand, the Milwaukee Art Museum will receive the Carnegie’s “Bathers with Crab” by Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

Each museum presented to the other a list of three paintings they were willing to part with for the bet. The other museum then selected one of the three paintings to become its tentative prize.

James clarified that “we’re not betting on ownership of a work of art.”

Instead, the paintings are going to be loaned for, as of press time, an undetermined period. As of yet, the Carnegie does not have any specific plans for the placement or presentation of their prize, although James reassures the people of Pittsburgh and Milwaukee alike, “We’re pretty sure we’re going to be the ones that win it.”

But this bet is about more than adding another painting, albeit temporarily, to one of the museums’ collections.

“It will let people know that the art museum is very much involved in the city, that we’re not just a bunch of stuffy old shirts,” James said. “It’s a great way to bridge two interests that people may not also associate with each other.”

It might be true that people today generally do not associate art and sports, but according to Pitt art-history professor Anne Weis, this was not always the case.

“Through most of the history of the world, the art world and the sports world have been very much in sync,” Weis said, pointing to the myriad paintings of race horses, rowers and boxers from the early 20th century and before.

Gretchen Bender, a Pitt art-history lecturer, is quick to agree with this statement, although she additionally thinks there’s a possibility the art world could, in fact, be inspired by modern-day sports.

“If there is ‘beauty’ in the milky presence of Monet’s paint strokes on the surface of the canvas … then could there also be ‘beauty’ in the arching reach of player, flying weightless above the ground, as he strives to catch the 30-yard pass in the red zone while landing lightly with both toes in bounds?” Bender asked.

The way sports are run today could be the reason for the apparent schism between the two industries, according to Weis.

“With less ‘heroism’ in sports as a public institution than in earlier decades and centuries, artists have focused on other long-term social interests … like social commentary and … the environment,” Weis said. In her opinion, scandals, steroids and money seem to be the main reasons artists have shied away from the sports arena.

Either way, this Super Bowl bet has the potential to make sports fan more aware of the art world, and vice versa. As Bender said, both sports and art remain “vibrant and powerful means of human expression.” This Super Bowl bet is merely an attempt at reuniting them.