# 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

## Births
### 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)