Athena Tennis Girl makes cheeky comeback – in the name of art

Mark Brown, arts correspondent guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 22 March 2011 17.35 GMT larger | smaller Article history

Fiona Walker, the woman in the famous Athena poster, poses with an original copy to launch the Court on Canvas exhibition. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA As an 18-year-old girl in the long hot summer of 1976

Fiona Walker, then Butler, cheerfully allowed her boyfriend, Martin Elliott, to photograph her knickerless, walking towards a tennis net. Elliott sold the image to Athena, and up it speedily went on the bedroom walls of boys everywhere, becoming one of the world's biggest-selling posters.

Now, the Athena Tennis Girl poster is to be included in what organisers say is the first exhibition exploring lawn tennis as a subject in fine art.

Walker was not then, nor ever has been, a tennis player. "I don't have the hand-eye co-ordination," she says. Nor has she made a penny from the poster. "I was naive and was paid nothing."

But she has fond memories of the photoshoot – in which she wore her dad's plimsolls – and harbours no embarrassment by the image. "It never ceases to make me smile when I see it. I have no regrets about it," she says.

Elliott – who did do very well out of the image – died last year.

Walker was reunited with the picture when she attended the launch of the exhibition called Court on Canvas. The show is being held this summer at Birmingham's Barber Institute of Fine Arts, less than half a mile from Ampton Road, Edgbaston, where the sport was played for the first time.

The exhibition will include more than 40 works by painters including LS Lowry, Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash, David Hockney and Eric Ravilious.

It will be curated by the Barber's director, Ann Sumner, a keen tennis player and fan. So keen, she recalls: "I was giving birth to my youngest daughter during the Steffi Graf Wimbledon final of 1991 and was very annoyed they didn't have a television available."

She hopes the show will be fun and illuminating but it also has a serious intent, not least as social history helping to chronicle the emancipation of women and the breakdown of class structures.

Lawn tennis was one of the first sports in which women could participate freely, but in the early works women are shown wearing heels, absurdly long dresses and hats as they serve and return. It was only in the 1930s that the legs came out.

"There are stunning images in the exhibition, and I think people will be amazed by their breadth," said Sumner.

The show includes art from the 1870s until the present day, with something of a gap from the second world war until the 1970s, during which period British interest in tennis declined.

The sexiness of lawn tennis will also be seen in a work going on public display for the first time, a portrait of 1930s Wimbledon finalist Bunny Austin – the man who controversially wore shorts – in which he is painted shirtless.

A parallel exhibition featuring memorabilia, photographs and outfits will chart the early history of the game created by two pals, Harry Gem and Jean Batista Augurio Perera.

• Court on Canvas: Tennis in Art is at the Barber Institute of Fine Art, Birmingham, from 27 May to 18 September.