1916 in art

Events

• February 5 – Cabaret Voltaire is opened by German poet Hugo Ball and his future wife Emmy Hennings in the back room of Ephraim Jan's Holländische Meierei in Zürich; although surviving only until the summer it is pivotal in the creation of Dada. Those who gather here include Marcel Janco, Richard Huelsenbeck, Tristan Tzara, Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Jean Arp.
• February 9 : 6.00 p.m. – Tristan Tzara "founds" Dada.
• March 1 – Liljevalchs konsthall inaugurated in Stockholm.
• May 20 – Boy with Baby Carriage is Norman Rockwell's first cover for The Saturday Evening Post.
• May – Muirhead Bone recruited as a war artist by the British War Propaganda Bureau. At the end of the year, his album of drawings The Western Front begins publication.
• June 16 – Cleveland Museum of Art opens in the United States.
• July 14 – Hugo Ball recites the Dada manifesto in Zürich.
• Summer – Paul Strand experiments with 'straight' abstract photography at Twin Lakes (Connecticut).
• August 31 – Kestnergesellschaft founded in Hanover, Germany.
• September 19 – Edvard Munch's paintings for the Aula of Det Kongelige Frederiks Universitet, Christiania, are inaugurated.
• September 26 – C. R. W. Nevinson's first major single-artist exhibition opens in London.
• November – John Nash arrives with the Artists Rifles in France.
• Vanessa Bell's first single-artist exhibition is staged at Omega Workshops in London.
• Provincial Fine Arts Museum completed in Córdoba, Argentina.
• Gilbert Cannan publishes his novel Mendel: a story of youth, based on the lives of those in his artistic circle of friends with a young Mark Gertler as the central figure, together with Dora Carrington, C. R. W. Nevinson and John Currie.
• Ezra Pound publishes Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir.

Works

• Paul Wayland Bartlett – Apotheosis of Democracy
• Vanessa Bell – '
• Umberto Boccioni – Portrait of Ferruccio Busoni
• Constantin Brâncuși – Princess X
• Frank Brangwyn – Mosaic for apse of St Aidan's Church, Leeds, England
• George Clausen – Youth Mourning
• Giorgio de Chirico
• * The Disquieting Muses
• * The Melancholy of Departure
• * Metaphysical Interior with Biscuits
• Marcel Duchamp – Apolinère Enameled '
• Jacob Epstein – '
• Abel Faivre – On les aura!
• Paul Gustav Fischer – Sunbathing in the Dunes
• Mark Gertler
• * Gilbert Cannan at his Mill
• * Merry-Go-Round
• J. W. Godward
• * Ancient Pastimes
• * By The Blue Ionian Sea
• * Lesbia With Her Sparrow
• George Grosz – Suicide
• Richard Jack – '
• Ernst Ludwig Kirchner – Königstein Station
• Gustav Klimt - Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer
• Laura Knight – Spring
• Boris Kustodiev
• * Fontanka
• * Shrovetide
• Alfred Laliberté – Les petits Baigneurs
• Fernand Léger – Soldier with a Pipe
• Wilhelm Lehmbruck – The Fallen
• Kazimir Malevich – Suprematist Composition
• Edward Middleton Manigault
• * Still Life with Lemons
• * Vorticist Landscape
• Henri Matisse – The Piano Lesson
• Jean Metzinger
• * Femme au miroir (Femme à sa toilette, Lady at her Dressing Table)
• * Fruit and a Jug on a Table
• Amedeo Modigliani
• * portrait of Beatrice Hastings
• * '
• * portrait of Max Jacob
• * Jacques and Berthe Lipchitz
• * two portraits of Chaïm Soutine
• * Reclining Nude
• * Reclining Nude on Blue Cushion
• * Seated Nude
• Claude Monet – paintings in Water Lilies series
• * Nympheas
• * Water Lilies
• C. R. W. Nevinson
• * Archies
• * '
• * Dog Tired
• * French Troops Resting
• Maxfield Parrish and Louis Comfort Tiffany – The Dream Garden commissioned for and installed in the lobby of the Curtis Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• Glyn Philpot
• * Man in a Flying Jacket
• * The Skyscraper
• Morton Livingston Schamberg – '
• Matthew Smith – Fitzroy Street Nude No. 1
• Paul Strand
• * '
• * ''White Fence''

Births

• January 23 – David Douglas Duncan, American war photographer
• April 11 – Irv Novick, American comic book artist
• April 20 – Gerald Dillon, Irish painter
• April 26 – Eyvind Earle, American illustrator and Disney artist
• June 24 – Saloua Raouda Choucair, Lebanese painter and sculptor
• July 25 – Fred Lasswell, American cartoonist
• September 29 – Carl Giles, English cartoonist
• October 18 – Jean-Yves Couliou, French painter
• November 3 – Harry Lampert, American cartoonist, advertising artist and author
• November 10 – Louis le Brocquy, Irish painter
• November 25 – Villu Toots, Estonian calligrapher, book designer, educator, paleograph and author
• December 7 – John G. Morris, American picture editor

Deaths

• January 17 – Marie Bracquemond, French Impressionist painter
• February 13 – Vilhelm Hammershøi, Danish painter
• March 4 – Franz Marc, German Expressionist painter
• June 25 – Thomas Eakins, American painter, sculptor and teacher
• June 29 – Georges Lacombe, French artist
• July 6 – Odilon Redon, French Symbolist painter and graphic artist
• July 29 – Eleanor Vere Boyle, English watercolorist
• August 17 – Umberto Boccioni, Italian Futurist painter and sculptor
• August 23 – Jean-Paul Aubé, French sculptor
• August 28 – Henri Harpignies, French landscape painter of the Barbizon school
• October 25 – William Merritt Chase, American Impressionist painter
• December 13 – Antonin Mercié, French sculptor and painter date unknown
• * Wu Shixian, Chinese landscape painter during the Qing dynasty
• * Branko Radulović, Serbian painter.