Events from the year 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 (according to Hans Arp).
• 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 (festival hall) 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 (pediment sculpture on United States Capitol)
• Vanessa Bell – Nude with Poppies
• Umberto Boccioni – Portrait of Ferruccio Busoni
• Constantin Brâncuși – Princess X (sculpture)
• Frank Brangwyn – Mosaic for apse of St Aidan's Church, Leeds, England^[1][2]
• George Clausen – Youth Mourning
• Giorgio de Chirico
  • The Disquieting Muses
  • The Melancholy of Departure
  • Metaphysical Interior with Biscuits
• Marcel Duchamp – Apolinère Enameled (approximate date)
• Jacob Epstein – The Tin Hat (bronze head)
• Abel Faivre – On les aura! (recruiting poster)
• 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 – The Return to the Front: Victoria Railway Station
• Ernst Ludwig Kirchner – Königstein Station
• Laura Knight – Spring (original version)
• Boris Kustodiev
  • Fontanka
  • Shrovetide (Масленица)

• Alfred Laliberté – Les petits Baigneurs (bronze, Montreal)
• Fernand Léger – Soldier with a Pipe
• Wilhelm Lehmbruck – The Fallen (sculpture)
• Kazimir Malevich – Suprematist Composition
• Edward Middleton Manigault
  • Still Life with Lemons
  • Vorticist Landscape (War Impressions) (approximate date)
• 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
  • Léon Indenbaum
  • portrait of Max Jacob
  • Jacques and Berthe Lipchitz
  • two portraits of Chaïm Soutine
  • Reclining Nude
• Claude Monet – paintings in Water Lilies series
  • Nympheas (Musée Marmottan Monet)
  • Water Lilies (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
• C. R. W. Nevinson
  • Archies
  • The Doctor
  • Dog-Tired
  • French Troops Resting
• Maxfield Parrish and Louis Comfort Tiffany - Dream Garden (glass mosaic) commissioned for and installed in the lobby of the Curtis Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania^[3]
• Glyn Philpot
  • Man in a Flying Jacket
  • The Skyscraper
• Morton Livingston Schamberg – Untitled (Mechanical Abstraction)
• Matthew Smith – Fitzroy Street Nude No. 1
• Paul Strand (photographs)
  • Abstraction, Porch Shadows, Twin Lakes, Connecticut
  • White Fence

Births

• January 23 – David Douglas Duncan, American war photographer (died 2018)
• April 11 – Irv Novick, American comic book artist (died 2004)
• April 20 – Gerald Dillon, Irish painter (died 1971)
• April 26 – Eyvind Earle, American illustrator and Disney artist (died 2000)
• June 24 – Saloua Raouda Choucair, Lebanese painter and sculptor (died 2017)
• July 25 – Fred Lasswell, American cartoonist (died 2001)
• September 29 – Carl Giles, English cartoonist (died 1995)
• October 18 – Jean-Yves Couliou, French painter (died 1995)
• November 3 – Harry Lampert, American cartoonist, advertising artist and author (died 2004)
• November 10 – Louis le Brocquy, Irish painter (died 2012)
• November 25 – Villu Toots, Estonian calligrapher, book designer, educator, paleograph and author (died 1993)
• December 7 – John G. Morris, American picture editor (died 2017)

Deaths

• January 17 – Marie Bracquemond, French Impressionist painter (born 1840)
• February 13 – Vilhelm Hammershøi, Danish painter (born 1864)
• March 4 – Franz Marc, German Expressionist painter (born 1880) (killed in action during Battle of Verdun)
• June 25 – Thomas Eakins, American painter, sculptor and teacher (born 1844)
• June 29 – Georges Lacombe, French artist (born 1868)
• July 6 – Odilon Redon, French Symbolist painter and graphic artist (born 1840)
• July 29 – Eleanor Vere Boyle, English watercolorist (born 1825)
• August 17 – Umberto Boccioni, Italian Futurist painter and sculptor (born 1882) (died following a fall during cavalry training)
• August 23 – Jean-Paul Aubé, French sculptor (born 1837)
• August 28 – Henri Harpignies, French landscape painter of the Barbizon school (born 1819)
• October 25 – William Merritt Chase, American Impressionist painter (born 1849)
• December 13 – Antonin Mercié, French sculptor and painter (born 1845)
• date unknown
  • Wu Shixian, Chinese landscape painter during the Qing dynasty (born unknown)
  • Branko Radulović, Serbian painter (born 1885).