1938 in art

List of years in art (table)
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Events

• Albert Namatjira exhibition in Melbourne includes over 2,000 works, the first solo display of indigenous Australian art.
• Kröller-Müller Museum, designed by Henry van de Velde, opens in Otterlo, Netherlands.
• American art collector Louis J. Caldor 'discovers' Grandma Moses.

Awards

• Archibald Prize: Nora Heysen – Mme Elink Schuurman

Works

• Vilmos Aba-Novák – Fair in Transylvania
• Rita Angus – Head of a Maori Boy
• Thomas Hart Benton – Haystack
• Constantin Brâncuși – The Endless Column (sculpture)
• Javier Bueno – The Fighter of Madrid
• Marc Chagall – White Crucifixion
• William Coldstream – Bolton
• Salvador Dalí
  • Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach
  • Rainy Taxi
• Charles Despiau – Assia (sculpture, Museum of Modern Art, New York)
• Arthur Dove – Swing Music
• M. C. Escher – Sky and Water II (lithograph)
• Leonor Fini – Composition with Figures on a Terrace
• Frida Kahlo
  • Four Inhabitants of Mexico City
  • Self-Portrait with Monkey
  • The Suicide of Dorothy Hale
  • What the Water Gave Me
• René Magritte – Time Transfixed
• Aristide Maillol – Air
• Ronald Moody – Tacet (carved wood head)
• Paul Nash
  • Landscape from a Dream
  • Nocturnal Landscape
• John Petts – Fishwife of Ynys Mon
• Pablo Picasso – Maya with Doll
• Walter Sickert – Sir Thomas Beecham Conducting
• Ignacio Zuloaga – The Alcázar in Flames (Heroic Landscape of Toledo)

Births

• January 2
  • David Bailey, English photographer
  • Robert Smithson, American artist (d. 1973)
• January 7 – Roland Topor, French illustrator, painter, writer and filmmaker (d. 1997)
• February 13 – Joan Brown, American figurative painter (d. 1990)
• March 15 – Dick Higgins, English composer, poet, printer and early Fluxus artist (d. 1998)
• May 12 – Paul Huxley, English painter and academic
• May 18 – Janet Fish, American Realist painter
• July 24 – Eugene J. Martin, American visual artist (d. 2005)
• July 28 – Robert Hughes, Australian-born art critic (d. 2012)
• August 19 – Robert Graham, Mexican-American sculptor (d. 2008)
• August 29 - Hermann Nitsch, Austrian performance artist
• September 25 – Bill Owens, American photographer
• September 27 - Günter Brus, Austrian performance artist
• October 15 – Brice Marden, American painter
• October 20 – Iain Macmillan, Scottish photographer (d. 2006)
• November 10 – Claude Serre, French cartoonist (d. 1998)
• date unknown
  • John Behan, Irish sculptor
  • Paul Neagu, Romanian-born artist (d. 2004)

Deaths

• January 1 – Alice Bailly, Swiss painter and multimedia artist (b. 1872)
• January 19 – Rosa Mayreder, Austrian freethinker, author, painter, musician and feminist (b. 1858)
• February 3 – Niels Skovgaard, Danish sculptor and painter (b. 1858)
• April 7 – Suzanne Valadon, French artists' model and painter, mother of Utrillo (b. 1865)
• April 24 – John Wycliffe Lowes Forster, Canadian historical portrait painter (b. 1850)
• May 22 – William Glackens, American realist painter (b. 1870)
• June 15 – Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, German Expressionist painter (b. 1880; suicide)
• October 24 – Ernst Barlach, German Expressionist sculptor (b. 1870)

See also

• 1938 in fine arts of the Soviet Union