Events from the year 1938 in art.

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• January 2 – SS Alba sinks off St Ives, Cornwall; the wreck is painted by local ex-fisherman naïve artist Alfred Wallis in several versions, one of which will subsequently be displayed in Tate St Ives, metres from the wreck.
• January 16 – International Exposition of Surrealism opens at the Galerie des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
• January 24 – Peggy Guggenheim opens her Guggenheim Jeune gallery at 30 Cork Street in London with a display of work by Jean Cocteau, followed in February by the first showing of Wassily Kandinsky's work in Britain.^[1]
• Spring/Summer – Wyndham Lewis's Portrait of T. S. Eliot is submitted for exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London but rejected (as expected by the artist),^[2][3] although Eliot himself approves of the painting and Augustus John resigns from the academy in reaction to its rejection.^[4]
• July 8 – Exhibition of twentieth century German art opens in London at the New Burlington Galleries, challenging the Nazi view of "degenerate art" in its home country.^[5]
• July 10 – Second Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung ("Great German Art Exhibition") opened by Adolf Hitler in the Haus der deutschen Kunst ("House of German Art") in Munich; Hitler attacks the contemporary London exhibition.^[5]
• July 13 – Kröller-Müller Museum, designed by Henry van de Velde, opens in Otterlo, Netherlands.
• September – Piet Mondrian moves from Paris to London.^[6]
• December 5–17 – Albert Namatjira exhibition in Melbourne includes over 2,000 works, the first solo display of indigenous Australian art.
• American art collector Louis J. Caldor 'discovers' the naïve paintings of Grandma Moses.

• Archibald Prize: Nora Heysen – Mme Elink Schuurman

• Vilmos Aba-Novák – Fair in Transylvania
• Rita Angus – Head of a Maori Boy
• Thomas Hart Benton – Haystack
• Constantin Brâncuși – The Endless Column (sculpture)
• Javier Bueno – The Fighter of Madrid
• Marc Chagall – White Crucifixion
• William Coldstream – Bolton
• Salvador Dalí
  • Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach
  • Impressions of Africa^[7]
  • Rainy Taxi
• Charles Despiau – Assia (sculpture, Museum of Modern Art, New York)
• Arthur Dove – Swing Music
• M. C. Escher – Sky and Water II (lithograph)
• Leonor Fini
  • Composition with Figures on a Terrace
  • D'Un jour à l'autre (From One Day to Another, diptych)
• Jared French - Lunchtime with Early Miners (mural) in Plymouth, Pennsylvania^[8]
• Edward Hopper – Compartment C, Car 293
• Kurt Hutton – Funfair, Southend, Essex (photograph)
• Frida Kahlo
  • Four Inhabitants of Mexico City
  • Self-Portrait with Monkey
  • The Suicide of Dorothy Hale
  • What the Water Gave Me
• Ernst Ludwig Kirchner – Violet House in Front of a Snowy Mountain
• Paul Klee - Oriental Bliss^[9]
• L. S. Lowry – Family Group
• René Magritte – Time Transfixed
• Aristide Maillol – Air
• Ronald Moody – Tacet (carved wood head)
• Paul Nash
  • Landscape from a Dream
  • Nocturnal Landscape
• John Petts – Fishwife of Ynys Mon
• Pablo Picasso
  • Femme au beret rouge-orange
  • Maya with Doll
• Walter Sickert – Sir Thomas Beecham Conducting
• Steffen Thomas – Pioneer Women
• Rex Whistler – Capriccio (dining room mural at Plas Newydd in North Wales)
• Ignacio Zuloaga – The Alcázar in Flames (Heroic Landscape of Toledo)

• January 2
  • David Bailey, English photographer
  • Robert Smithson, American artist (d. 1973)
• January 7 – Roland Topor, French illustrator, painter, writer and filmmaker (d. 1997)
• February 13 – Joan Brown, American figurative painter (d. 1990)
• February 22 – Paul Neagu, Romanian-born artist (d. 2004)^[10]
• March 6 – Pauline Boty, English pop art painter (d. 1966)
• March 15 – Dick Higgins, English composer, poet, printer and early Fluxus artist (d. 1998)
• April 20 – Andrew Vicari, Welsh-born portrait painter (d. 2016)
• May 12 – Paul Huxley, English painter and academic
• May 18 – Janet Fish, American Realist painter
• May 20 – Astrid Kirchherr, German photographer (d. 2020)
• July 24 – Eugene J. Martin, American visual artist (d. 2005)
• July 28 – Robert Hughes, Australian-born art critic (d. 2012)
• July 30 – Terry O'Neill, British photographer (d. 2019)
• August 19 – Robert Graham, Mexican-American sculptor (d. 2008)
• August 29 – Hermann Nitsch, Austrian performance artist
• September 1 – Per Kirkeby, Danish artist (d. 2018)
• September 25 – Bill Owens, American photographer
• September 27 – Günter Brus, Austrian performance artist
• October 10 – Daidō Moriyama, Japanese photographer
• October 15 – Brice Marden, American painter
• October 20 – Iain Macmillan, Scottish photographer (d. 2006)
• November 2 – Richard Serra, American abstract sculptor (d. 2024)
• November 10 – Claude Serre, French cartoonist (d. 1998)
• December 25 – Duane Armstrong, American painter
• date unknown
  • John Behan, Irish sculptor
  • Rotraut Klein-Moquay, German-French visual artist
  • Takeshi Mizukoshi, Japanese landscape photographer

• January 1 – Alice Bailly, Swiss painter and multimedia artist (b. 1872)
• January 19 – Rosa Mayreder, Austrian freethinker, author, painter, musician and feminist (b. 1858)
• February 3 – Niels Skovgaard, Danish sculptor and painter (b. 1858)
• February 28 – C. E. Brock, English painter and illustrator (b. 1870)
• April 7 – Suzanne Valadon, French artists' model and painter, mother of Utrillo (b. 1865)
• April 24 – John Wycliffe Lowes Forster, Canadian historical portrait painter (b. 1850)
• May 22 – William Glackens, American realist painter (b. 1870)
• June 5 – Mikuláš Galanda, Slovak modernist painter and illustrator (b. 1895)
• June 15 – Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, German Expressionist painter (b. 1880; suicide)
• June 19 – María Obligado de Soto y Calvo, Argentinian painter (b. 1857)
• June 24 – C. Yarnall Abbott, American photographer and painter (b. 1870)
• September 6 – Mary Seton Watts, British symbolist craftswoman and designer (b. 1849)
• October 24 – Ernst Barlach, German Expressionist sculptor (b. 1870)
• Antonio Fabrés, Catalan painter (b. 1854)

• 1938 in fine arts of the Soviet Union