1941 - Art

Art

Painting: Nighthawks by Edward Hopper; New York under Gaslight by Stuart Davis; Bird by Wyoming-born abstractionist (Paul) Jackson Pollock, 29; That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do by Ivan Albright; Women with Bulldog by Francis Picabia, now 62; Still Life with Sausages by Pablo Picasso; Divers Against Yellow Background by Fernand Léger; Self-Portrait with Bonito (a parrot) by Frida Kahlo. Robert Delaunay dies at Montpelier, France, October 25 at age 56.

Mount Rushmore National Monument attracts visitors to South Dakota following the death of sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who suffered a fatal heart attack following surgery March 6 at age 73. Borglum has developed new methods of stoneworking to carve 60-foot high heads of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt out of the rock. His son Lincoln works to improve the collar and lapels on Washington's coat, Jefferson's collar, Lincoln's head, and Roosevelt's face, but Congress cut off funding for the project a week before his father's death (having appropriated a total of more than $987,000 for it), and the massive work will be left incomplete.

The National Gallery of Art opens at Washington, D.C., where a $15 million bequest from the late Pittsburg financier Andrew W. Mellon has financed construction of the rose-white Tennessee marble building (see 1938). When he died in 1937, Mellon left an art collection acquired at the persuasion of the London art dealer Baron Duveen of Milbank, now 72. The gallery will house other major collections as well.