10 Contests That Resulted in Famous Works of Art

It seems curious that contests could produce famous works of art. Surely, we might think passion alone, unrelated to money and praise, is the sole source of such superb creations. If so, the ten contests that resulted in the famous masterpieces on this list may change our minds.

Related: 10 Fake Paintings and Sculptures That Turned Out to Be Real

10 Ninety-Fifth Olympiad Art Contest

As Pliny the Elder relates in the 35th book of his Natural History, in the fourth year of the 95th Olympiad (397–396 BC), the artist Zeuxis of Heraclea entered a contest against his fellow artist Parrhasius of Ephesus. The former’s painting, depicting grapes, was so realistic that birds were attracted to it.

Convinced that his painting had obviously won, he asked Parrhasius to open the curtain that was screening his work so that it could be viewed. However, the curtain could not be moved; it was Parrhasius’s own work of art. So astonished was Zeuxis that he passed his prize to his rival since his grapes had merely fooled birds, while Parrhasius’s curtain had fooled an artist––Zeuxis himself.^[1]

9 The Arte del Calimala Competition

As the AFI Fine Art website indicates, the 1401 competition between Lorenzo Ghiberti and Filippo Brunelleschi offered a huge reward: “the incredibly lucrative” commission “to maintain and embellish” the doors for the French Baptistry.

The competitors were required to present panels illustrating Abraham’s offering of his son Issac. In doing so, though, they faced severe “limitations”: the amount of bronze they’d be provided, the number of figures they could include, and the dimensions and configuration their work could take. It had to fit inside the pointed shape of the Gothic quatrefoil. Ghiberti, the younger artist, won, receiving 4,000 florins, or about $560,000 today, for the panels he created over 20 years.^[2]

8 Newspaper Contest

Edgar Allan Poe’s mother died when he was three years old, and his father had already abandoned them. Although wealthy merchant John Allan and his wife Frances reared him, the couple never adopted him, and Poe and his foster father were never close. Their relationship became increasingly strained after Frances’s death when Poe was twenty. Allan, who wanted to direct Poe’s life, disapproved of his foster son’s career choice and later disowned him.

After getting expelled from the U. S. Military Academy, Poe entered an 1833 newspaper contest, and his short story, “MS Found in a Bottle,” won, helping to launch his career as a writer and editor. Although he “remained impoverished and all but destitute,” he became a respected writer in his own day, and posthumously, he attained fame and esteem as one of America’s great short stories and poetry writers.^[3]

7 Palace of Westminster Reconstruction Design Contest

On October 16, 1834, architects Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin, among thousands of others, watched as the Palace of Westminster burned. Soon after, a contest commenced, inviting contestants to submit designs for the palace’s reconstruction. Barry’s submission, a masterful “blend of old and new” enhanced by Pugin’s drawings of “Gothic details,” won, as DK’s The Architecture Book observes.

The Palace of Westminster Factsheet points out some of these old and new features: the “surviving” Westminster Hall, the Cloisters of St. Stephen’s College, and the Chapel of St. Mary Undercroft are old; such additions as “the Palace’s ornate Gothic interiors, including carvings, gilt work, [and] paneling,” are new.^[4]

6 Central Park Landscape Design Contest

The creation of the first landscaped public park in the United States stemmed from what was, in 1853, initially a 700-acre tract of land before it was expanded to 843 acres ten years later. And it was a huge undertaking. The country’s first landscape design contest took place in 1857, during which Frederick Law Olmstead’s “Greensward Plan” was chosen as the winner.

The joint submission of the park’s superintendent and his former partner, Calvert Vaux, the plan was to shape the land into “a pastoral landscape” of “rolling hills” resembling the countryside familiar to Vaux, who had been born in England. Undulations of green lawn would contrast with the wooded Ramble and “more formal dress grounds of the Mall (Promenade) and Bethesda Terrace.”

The landscapers’ vision didn’t always agree with that of locals, though. Concessions were made so that, ultimately, the landscaping of the park became something of a joint project between Olmstead and Vaux and the public. It would continue to change and develop up to the present and, most likely, beyond.^[5]

5 National Federation of Music Clubs Contest

In 1893, during a trip to Colorado, Massachusetts-born Katherine Lee Bates penned the lines of a poem published in 1895 that would become the lyrics of the popular patriotic song “America the Beautiful.” Although a talented poet, Bates was not a musician, so, as the U.S. Library of Congress website points out, people sang its words “to almost any popular air or folk tune with which the lyrics fit,” “Auld Lang Syne” being one of the most common.

It wasn’t until 1929, the year of the poet’s death, that her beloved poem was set to music, the hymn “Materna” that Samuel Ward had written for a contest by the National Federation of Music Clubs. As the Song Facts website observes, the work of art, as it came to exist through the joint efforts of Bates and Ward, continued to be “the most popular ‘American’ song until Kate Smith recorded Irving Berlin’s ‘God Bless America’ in 1938.”^[6]

4 Canberra City Design Contest

If not for Marion Mahony Griffin’s artwork, Frank Lloyd Wright might not have become a celebrated architect. Both an architect herself and an artist influenced by “the Japanese style,” the MIT graduate captured Wright’s visions in an attractive way that drew attention to his work, showing how the houses and other buildings he planned would look upon completion.

Wright hired her despite the rampant discrimination against women at the time, and they worked together from 1895 until 1909 when Wright left for Europe to undertake a publishing project involving his work.

In 1911, Marion married her former colleague, Walter Burley Griffin. They won a contest for the design of Canberra, Australia’s new capital city, and they moved to Australia in 1914. As writer-columnist Glenda Korporaal notes, although “their basic plans for the layout of the city were eventually realized, many of their more specific design ideas were changed as the city was built.”

The couple also designed other projects, including the suburb Castlecraig in Australia. Despite her talent and successes, Marion died in poverty in 1961, following the death of her husband in 1937.^[7]

3 Olympics Arts Competition

Mindful that the original Olympics had included an art competition as well as sports competitions, Baron Pierre de Coubertin advocated for the return of the discarded contest. Despite resistance to his proposal, in 1912, at the Fifth Olympiad, medals were awarded in five categories of sports-related art: architecture, literature, music, painting, and sculpture. Only 35 contestants competed. The baron, who may have been the sole judge at the time, awarded the prize for literature to himself for his pseudonymous “Ode to Sport,” which he wrote in case there was a dearth of entrants in the arts competitions.

A panel of judges, instituted thereafter, either didn’t want art included with athletic events or were more discerning than the baron and awarded few medals despite many entries. These included paintings reflecting obvious artistic ability, among which was a winner, The Liffey Swim (1923) by John B. Yates, poet William Butler Yeats’s brother. It was awarded a silver medal and is now displayed in the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin.^[8]

2 Sydney Opera House

Australians didn’t know quite what to make of it. Was it, writers of letters to the Sydney Morning Herald wondered, a “Danish pastry”? An “armadillo”? A “circus tent” to be used for “disinfection”? “The Loch Ness monster”? “An insect [that] crawled out from under a log?” Premier of New South Wales Joe Cahill had the answer: The winning entry to the Sydney Opera House design contest was “a concept capable of becoming one of the great buildings of the world.”

Submitted not by an Australian but by 38-year-old Danish architect Jørn Utzon, it had been chosen from among the 1957 contest’s 200 entries. Not only did Utzon win the £5,000 prize, but he was also installed as the building project’s chief architect. Work got underway in 1959. Due to events beyond his control, including “technical challenges and building delays,” the construction of the opera house took fourteen years. It cost $102 million, way more than the initial $7 million initially budgeted. Utzon, forced to resign, was replaced by a panel of architects. Today, the Sydney Opera House is regarded, both by Australians and the rest of the world, as a superb work of architectural art.^[9]

1 Vietnam Veterans Memorial Design Contest

.A poster that 21-year-old Yale University architecture student Maya Lin submitted as a “last-minute” class project assignment won her the 1981 national competition for the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, DC. According to author Dr. Jackie Craven, Lin, trained as an artist and an architect, is best known for her large, minimalist sculptures and monuments. Although her entry won over the judges, it wasn’t initially a hit with many members of the public, but her “stark, black monument” launched Lin’s career. She herself saw her sketch of the memorial as “very painterly.”

Although some initially had doubts about Lin’s unusual memorial, many have come to appreciate her vision, and even her critics are likely to agree that the architect’s ebony wall of names is, indeed, a stark reminder of the cost of war.^[10]