1933 in art

Events from the year 1933 in art.

• January 12 – George Grosz emigrates from Nazi Germany to the United States.^[1]
• 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.^[2]
• 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.^[3]
• 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.^[4]
• 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.^[5]
• 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.

• 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

• Archibald Prize: Charles Wheeler – Ambrose Pratt

• 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)^[6]
• 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)

• 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)^[7]
  • Michael Noakes, English portrait painter (d. 2018)^[8]
• 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)

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

• 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)

• 1933 in fine arts of the Soviet Union