1919 in art

Events

• January–June – Paris Peace Conference at Versailles; Sir William Orpen attends as British official artist and Noël Dorville as a French journalist-illustrator.
• April 15 – Publication in England of W. Somerset Maugham's novel The Moon and Sixpence, loosely based on the life of Paul Gauguin.
• April 25 – The Bauhaus architectural and design movement is founded in Weimar, Germany, by Walter Gropius.
• December – The National War Paintings and Other Records exhibition staged at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.
• Seven and Five Society established in London.
• Piet Mondrian, in Paris, begins painting his grid-based compositions.
• The first bronze castings from Degas sculptures are made, posthumously.
• Musée Rodin opens in Paris at the Hôtel Biron and Villa des Brillants, Meudon.
• Chaïm Soutine first visits Céret in the Pyrenees where he begins a series of landscapes.Les Champs Magnétiques, the first book produced using the techniques of surrealist automatism, is written by André Breton and Philippe Soupault.

Works

• Norman G. Arnold – The Last Fight of Captain Ball, VC, DSO and 2 Bars, MC, 7th May 1917
• Max Beckmann – The Night
• George Bellows – Tennis at Newport
• David Bomberg – Sappers at Work: A Canadian Tunnelling Company, Hill 60, St Eloi
• John Arnesby Brown – '
• Sydney Carline
• * Flying Above Kirkuk, Kurdistan
• * Flying Over the Desert at Sunset, Mesopotamia
• * The Trail of War
• Harry Clarke – illustrations to Tales of Mystery & Imagination
• Dorothy Coke – '
• Philip Connard
• * The Guns of HMS 'Caesar' 1919 – Off Constantinople, looking towards the Golden Horn
• * '
• Leonard Crunelle – Statue of Richard J. Oglesby
• Evelyn De Morgan – The Gilded Cage
• Marcel Duchamp – L.H.O.O.Q.
• Aleksandra Ekster – City at Night
• Jacob Epstein – Sergeant D. F. Hunter VC, 1/5 Highland Light Infantry
• Max Ernst
• * Aquis Submersus
• * Trophy, Hypertrophied
• Luke Fildes – Paul Fildes
• Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven – Portrait of Marcel Duchamp
• Colin Gill
• * Evening, After a Push
• * '
• * '
• Eileen Gray – "Dragons" armchair
• Elioth Gruner – Spring Frost
• Childe Hassam – The Avenue in the Rain
• Hannah Höch – Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser DADA durch die letzte weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands
• Augustus John – Marchesa Casati
• Henry Lamb – '
• Fernand Léger
• * The City
• * The Railway Crossing
• Ivor Lewis – Timothy Eaton statues
• Wyndham Lewis – A Battery Shelled
• David Low – Strange, I seem to hear a child weeping
• Hermon Atkins MacNeil – Statue of Ezra Cornell
• Albert Marquet – La femme blonde
• Henri Matisse – Les plumes blanches
• Claude Monet – paintings in Water Lilies series
• * Le Bassin Aux Nymphéas
• * Water Lilies
• Edvard Munch – Self-Portrait with the Spanish Flu
• Paul Nash – The Menin Road
• C. R. W. Nevinson – The Harvest of Battle
• Georgia O'Keeffe – Red and Orange Streak
• Sir William Orpen
• * A Peace Conference at the Quai d'Orsay
• * The Signing of Peace in the Hall of Mirrors, Versailles, 28th June 1919
• Pablo Picasso
• *Le Tricorne
• *Still Life with Pitcher and Apples
• John Singer Sargent – Gassed
• Zinaida Serebriakova – House of Cards
• Charles Sims – The Old German Front Line, Arras, 1916
• Stanley Spencer – Travoys with Wounded Soldiers Arriving at a Dressing Station at Smol, Macedonia, September 1916
• Edward Wadsworth – ''Dazzle-ships in Drydock at Liverpool''

Births

January to June

• January 5 – Frederick Hammersley, American painter
• January 9 – Henrietta Berk, American painter
• January 19 – Joan Brossa, Catalan poet, playwright, graphic designer and plastic artist
• January 22 – John Russell, British American art critic
• January 24 – William Copley, American artist
• March 23 – Salvatore Scarpitta, American sculptor
• April 9 – Gordon Lambert, Irish art collector
• April 24 – César Manrique, Spanish artist and architect
• May 3 – John Cullen Murphy, American comics artist
• May 9 – Anne Yeats, Irish painter and stage designer
• May 27 – Emvin Cremona, Maltese artist
• June 2 – Nat Mayer Shapiro, American painter
• June 7 – Mira Schendel, born Myrrha Dub, Swiss-Brazilian modernist artist and poet
• June 18 – Gordon A. Smith, Canadian artist and teacher
• June 21 – Jean Joyet, French artist

July to December

• July 6 – Oswaldo Guayasamín, Ecuadorian painter and sculptor
• July 17 – Jean Leymarie, French art historian
• July 18 – Daniel du Janerand, French painter
• July 31 – Maurice Boitel, French painter
• September 8 – Maria Lassnig, Austrian painter
• September 29 – Vladimír Vašíček, Czech painter
• November 3 – Jesús Blasco, Spanish comic books author and artist
• December 12 – Cliff Holden, English painter, designer and silk-screen printer
• December 24 – Pierre Soulages, French "painter of black"

Full date unknown

• Avni Arbaş, Turkish artist

Deaths

• January 22 – Carl Larsson, Swedish painter
• February 18 – Antonin Carlès, French sculptor
• February 27 – Robert Harris, Canadian painter
• March 24 – Franz Metzner, German sculptor
• March 25 – Wilhelm Lehmbruck, German sculptor
• May 2 – Evelyn De Morgan, English painter
• May 13 – Helen Hyde, American etcher and engraver
• August 9 – Ralph Albert Blakelock, American painter
• November 18 – John Dibblee Crace, British interior decorator
• December 2 – Henry Clay Frick, American founder of the Frick Collection
• December 3 – Pierre-Auguste Renoir, French Impressionist painter
• December 18 – James Coutts Michie, Scottish painter b. 1859)
• Full date unknown – Edmund Elisha Case, American painter