1938 - Art

Art

Painting: Still Life by Bologna abstract expressionist Giorgio Morandi, 48, who wrote 10 years ago, "I have had much faith in Fascism since its first inklings, faith that has never ebbed, not even in the darkest and most tumultuous moments"; Italian Women by Georges Rouault; Still Life with Red Bull's Head, Nude Lying on a Couch, and Seated Woman in a Garden (his mistress Dora Mar) by Pablo Picasso; The Broken Key (oil on burlap) by Paul Klee; Thérèse Dreaming by Balthus; Self-Portrait with a Horn by Max Beckmann, who moved with his wife last year to Amsterdam, going into exile from Nazi Germany, where his paintings have been systematically removed from museums and otherwise confiscated; Cradling Wheat by Thomas Hart Benton; Swing Landscape by Stuart Davis; Apples in Wooden Basket by Walt Kuhn. William Glackens dies at Westport, Conn., May 22 at age 68; Ernst Ludwig Kirchner by his own hand at Davos, Switzerland, June 15 at age 58 (the Nazis last year confiscated more than 600 of his works).

Sculpture: Forms in Echelon (wood) by English sculptor Barbara Hepworth, 35, who attended Leeds School of Art with Henry Moore when she was 16 and he 21 at a time when, as Moore would later observe, a woman studying sculpture was not taken seriously. Hepworth has 4-year-old triplets plus an older son by a previous marriage; Apple Monster (stabile) by Alexander Calder. Sculptor-playwright Ernst Barlach dies at Güstrow, Germany, October 24 at age 68 (his studio at Güstrow will be turned into a museum).

The National Gallery of Art is founded at Washington, D.C., under the direction of David Finley, 47, who will head the institution until 1956. Financed by the late banker-philanthropist Andrew Mellon, its president is his son Paul, 31, who will serve as president again next year and from 1963 to 1975 (he will be chairman from 1979 to 1985; see 1941).

The Cloisters opens in New York's Fort Tryon Park. A gift from the Rockefeller family to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the medieval European nunnery is filled with art treasures that include a unicorn tapestry and the collection of early Gothic and medieval works acquired by John D. Rockefeller Jr. in 1925 from Pennsylvania-born sculptor George Grey Barnard, who dies at New York April 24 at age 74, leaving unfinished his Memorial Arch, intended for the art center overlooking the Hudson River.