The 1000++ Artworks created around 1950

Lawrence painted The Shoemaker in December 1945, the same month he returned from service in World War II. It was among the first of a dozen paintings the artist made over the course of the following year, all focused on Black workers—from steelworkers to stenographers, professors to barbers. Uninter...

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In 1920, the young artist Josef Albers enrolled at the Bauhaus, the recently founded school of art, architecture, and design in Weimar, Germany. With its strong utilitarian emphasis, the Bauhaus placed equal importance on technical and artistic skills. The basis of its education was the 'preliminary...

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Mondrian developed this grid with commercial adhesive tape. Clues such as clusters of pushpin holes, pencil outlines, and unpainted patches show how the artist adjusted the composition over time, paying special attention to how the bands overlapped. The fact that he had already begun to replace tape...

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Seeking to make the familiar unfamiliar, René Magritte used his art to question the nature of appearances. He devised a number of strategies—displacements and transformations—that unsettle the balance between nature and artifice, truth and fiction, and reality and surreality. Night in Pisa (La nuit ...

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The title of this panel is drawn from a speech delivered by Virginia statesman Patrick Henry defending the colonial cause. Its reference to enslavement galvanized patriots to demand liberty from the British—an argument hypocritical to some, coming from a Southern enslaver. In the painting, Lawrence ...

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A legendary episode in American history, recently popularized in a landmark Broadway musical, the final confrontation between personal and political rivals former Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton and Vice President Aaron Burr transpired July 11, 1804, in Weehawken, New Jersey, on a popul...

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In August 1939, one month before the outbreak of World War II, Miró moved with his wife to Varengeville in Normandy, France. During the Nazi occupation, Miró created a series of gouaches, the Constellations, on which this painting is based. André Breton described Miró's faces, stars, wings, lines, a...

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Depicting a brutal physical conflict between Black men and their oppressors, this painting represents the suppressed revolt planned by the enslaved Captain James to free populations between Greene County, Georgia, and Halifax County, North Carolina, in April 1810. Under ferocious attack, the central...

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Against horizontal registers of red, white, and blue paint, Lawrence laid out the aftermath of General Andrew Jackson’s remarkable victory over the British on January 8, 1815, at the Battle of New Orleans. Jackson credited the resounding victory to the valiant participation of the Kentuckians, Creol...

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Ernst is most closely associated with Dada and Surrealism: artistic and literary movements in Europe in the 1910s and 1920s that prized the irrational and the unconscious over order and reason. Among the techniques favored by these artists were ones that welcomed the hand of chance. This work demons...

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