1933 in art

Events from the year 1933 in art.

Events

 * January 12 – George Grosz emigrates from Nazi Germany to the United States.
 * February/March – Käthe Kollwitz is forced by the Nazi Party in Germany to resign from the faculty of the Academy of Arts, Berlin.
 * April
 * Closure of the Bauhaus.
 * Freddy Mayor opens a gallery in Cork Street, London, specialising in modernism.
 * May – The mural Man at the Crossroads by Diego Rivera at the Rockefeller Center in New York is covered up because it contains a portrait of Lenin. While Rivera has been working on it, he has been joined in the United States by Frieda Kahlo who begins her painting My Dress Hangs There.
 * June 12 – Paul Nash, in a letter to The Times of London, announces formation of the group Unit One by young British artists to promote modernism in Britain.
 * July – New Midland Hotel, Morecambe, on the Lancashire coast of England, designed by Oliver Hill, is opened incorporating sculpture by Eric Gill and murals by Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden.
 * September/October – "Henri Cartier-Bresson and an Exhibition of Anti-Graphic Photography" staged at Julien Levy's gallery in New York City.
 * September – Artists Union formed in the United States as the Emergency Work Bureau Artists Group.
 * December 12 – Scholars of the Warburg Institute in Hamburg resolve to relocate from Nazi Germany to London.
 * Black Mountain College founded by John Andrew Rice.
 * Hans Bellmer produces his first Doll sculpture.
 * Barbara Hepworth and John Skeaping are divorced; Hepworth is already in a relationship with Ben Nicholson.
 * Kenneth Clark appointed Director of the National Gallery, London, at age 30, taking up his post in January 1934.

Works



 * Jean Arp – Head and Shell (bronze)
 * Gutzon Borglum – Statue of Harvey W. Scott (bronze, Portland, Oregon)
 * Bill Brandt – Parlourmaid and Under-Parlourmaid Ready to Serve Dinner (documentary photograph)
 * Tarsila do Amaral – Operarios
 * Jacob Epstein
 * Man of Aran (portrait bust of 'Tiger' King)
 * Primeval Gods / Sun God (double-sided Hoptonwood stone carving)
 * Portrait busts of Lord Beaverbrook, Prof. Albert Einstein, Robert Flaherty, John Gielgud and Dr Chaim Weizmann
 * James Gunn – Eleanor Rathbone
 * C. Paul Jennewein
 * Spirit of Justice (sculpture, Department of Justice Building, Washington, D.C.)
 * Western Civilization (pediment sculpture, Philadelphia Museum of Art)
 * Frieda Kahlo
 * My Dress Hangs There (Allá cuelga mi vestido)
 * Self-portrait – Very Ugly (Autorretrato – muy fea)
 * André Kertész – Distortions (photographs)
 * René Magritte – The Human Condition (first version)
 * Tom Monnington – Admiral of the Fleet Sir John Jellicoe
 * Hilda Rix Nicholas – The Summer House (approximate date)
 * Pablo Picasso – Minotaur Kneeling over Sleeping Girl (etching)
 * Gabriel Pippet – mosaic interior decoration, Church of the Sacred Heart and St Catherine of Alexandria, Droitwich Spa, England (completed)
 * Diego Rivera
 * Detroit Industry Murals (frescoes for Detroit Institute of Arts)
 * Man at the Crossroads (mural, original version for Rockefeller Center, New York, destroyed)
 * Percy Shakespeare
 * Mephistopheles
 * A Mulatto
 * Amrita Sher-Gil – Sleep
 * John Skeaping – Horse (sculpture in mahogany and pynkado, originally in Whipsnade Zoo; later in Tate Gallery)
 * Carel Willink – The Zeppelin

Awards

 * Archibald Prize: Charles Wheeler – Ambrose Pratt

January to June

 * February 8 – Richard Allen, British abstract minimalist Op, Pop, Geometric painter and printmaker (d. 1999)
 * February 18 – Yoko Ono, Japanese-born sculptor, filmmaker, installation artist and musician
 * February 22 – Joseph Raffael, painter (d. 2021)
 * February 27
 * Ansgar Elde, Swedish ceramic artist (d. 2000)
 * Edward Lucie-Smith, British art critic and poet
 * March 4 – John W. Mills, English sculptor
 * March 10 – Abdul Hay Mosallam Zarara, Palestinian artist (d. 2020)
 * March 17 – Stass Paraskos, Greek Cypriot painter (d. 2014)
 * April 1 – Dan Flavin, American minimalist artist (d. 1996)
 * April 9 – René Burri, Swiss photographer (d. 2014)
 * April 15 – David Hamilton, English photographer (d. 2016)
 * April 23 – Roger Wittevrongel, Belgian artist
 * April 29 – Alison Knowles, American Fluxus performance artist, sound artist, papermaker and printmaker
 * June 11 – Harald Szeemann, Swiss curator and art historian (d. 2005)
 * June 12 – Eddie Adams, American Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer (d. 2004)
 * June 23
 * Michelangelo Pistoletto, Italian object artist, action painter and art theorist
 * Hermenegildo Sábat, Uruguayan-Argentine caricaturist (d. 2018)

July to December

 * 8 July – Jeff Nuttall, English poet, publisher, actor, painter and sculptor (d. 2004)
 * 18 July – Cécile Guillame, first woman to engrave French postal stamps (d. 2004)
 * 21 July – Laila Pullinen, Finnish sculptor (d. 2015)
 * 18 August – Michael Baxandall, Welsh art historian (d. 2008)
 * August 29 – Sorel Etrog, Romanian-born Canadian sculptor, writer and philosopher (d. 2014)
 * September 18 – Mark di Suvero, Chinese-born Italian American abstract expressionist sculptor
 * September 30 – Ilya Kabakov, Soviet-born conceptual artist (d. 2023)
 * October 9 – Bill Tidy, British cartoonist and illustrator (d. 2023)
 * October 28
 * Audrey Amiss, English artist (d. 2013)
 * Michael Noakes, English portrait painter (d. 2018)
 * October 29 – Sydney Ball, Australian abstract painter (d. 2017)
 * November 8 – Lothar Fischer, German sculptor (d. 2004)
 * November 18
 * Bruce Conner, American artist in experimental film, drawing, sculpture, painting, collage and photography (d. 2008)
 * Charlotte Moorman, American Fluxus performance artist (d. 1991)
 * November 29 – James Rosenquist, American painter and muralist (d. 2017)
 * November 30 – Sam Gilliam, American painter (d. 2022)
 * December 14 – Bapu, Indian film director, cartoonist and painter (d. 2014)

Full date of birth unknown

 * John Stuart Ingle, American realist watercolorist (d. 2010)

Deaths

 * January 10 – Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, Scottish designer (b. 1865)
 * January 17 – Louis Comfort Tiffany, American stained glass artist (b. 1848)
 * February 3 – Anne de Rochechouart de Mortemart, Duchesse d'Uzès, French patron and sculptor (b. 1847)
 * February 22 – Archibald Knox, Manx designer (b. 1864)
 * February 28 – Lilla Cabot Perry, American Impressionist painter (b. 1848)
 * March 9 – Joakim Skovgaard, Danish painter (b. 1856)
 * March 10 – Émile André, French architect and designer (b. 1871)
 * April 16 – Harold Peto, English architect and garden designer (b. 1854)
 * May 6 – François Pompon, French sculptor (b. 1856)
 * May 25 – James E. Kelly, American sculptor and illustrator (b. 1855)
 * June 14 – Hans Prinzhorn, German art historian (b. 1886)
 * August 5 – Charles Harold Davis, American landscape painter (b. 1856)
 * August 8 – Adolf Loos, Austrian Modernist architect (b. 1870)
 * September 27 – Zaida Ben-Yusuf, American portrait photographer (b. 1869)
 * October 2 – Elizabeth Thompson, British painter (b. 1846)
 * October 24 – Annie Swynnerton, English painter (b. 1844)
 * October 26 – José Malhoa, Portuguese painter (b. 1855)
 * October 29 – George Luks, American realist painter (b. 1867)
 * November 12 – F. Holland Day, American photographer (b. 1864)
 * November 14 – Thomas Hayton Mawson, English garden designer (b. 1861)
 * November 15 – Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann, French furniture designer (b. 1879)
 * November 19 – Louise Jopling, English painter (b. 1843)
 * December 4 – W. G. R. Sprague, British theatre designer (b. 1863)
 * date unknown – Susan Isabel Dacre, English painter (b. 1844)