Under these guidelines, it's amusing to imagine who might be winning medals today if the Olympics were still holding art competitions. "LeRoy Neiman, the painter known for his celebratory images of sports greats, might well have been... the Michael Phelps of oils," New York Times writer Charles Isherwood remarked on the subject in 2010. "Might the lyric winner for the 1998 Winter Olympics have been a tribute to the infamous skating scandal of the previous games, something titled 'The Ballad of Tonya and Nancy'?"

There's a reason, though, why so few of us have ever heard of these Olympic art competitions. Art history and Olympic history both largely glossed over them because, to put it simply, they had little impact on either one. Few artists of note ever competed in the Olympic art competitions because professional artists were prohibited from entering; thus, among the best-known winners of Olympic medals for art are the American architect Charles Downing Lay and one Joseph Webster Golinkin, a lithographer whose oeuvre included designs for a number of American stamps.

Many details of the art contests (and many medal-winning artists) have receded into oblivion over the years because of the lack of attention and documentation the art division of the Games received.

When the Olympic historian Bernhard Kramer went in search of these lost Olympic art champions, he concluded that, sadly, a large portion of the medal-winning artists and artworks had been lost to history. His ensuing paper is strewn with the likes of "No documentary evidence can be given at the moment," "Her poem is also lost," and "A reproduction of Gerhardus Bernardus Westermann's bronze medal-winning painting Horseman could not be found."

Among the best-documented Olympic art competitions, however, is the one held at the 1936 Summer Games in Berlin.

1936: AN ART COMPETITION TO REMEMBER

At the opening ceremony of 1936 Olympic art competition, Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels reminded his audience that each work entered in the competition was required to have been created within the last four years. This restriction, he declared, "enables us to derive from the Exhibition an estimate of international conditions."

Enable us it did. The detailed descriptions in the Official Report of the 11th Olympic Games not only provide a dazzling depiction of this charmingly peculiar Olympic-art phenomenon, but also a chilling snapshot of Germany during the emergence of the Third Reich.

Home-field advantage, it seems, greatly worked in Germany's favor that year. The international jury consisted of 29 German judges and 12 from other European countries. What little evidence exists suggests that very few other host nations so generously populated their international juries with their own nationals, with one noteworthy exception: In 1932, the United States included 24 American judges in a panel of 30—to a similarly victorious effect.