1947 in art

Events

• January 14 – Jackson Pollock's fourth solo exhibition opens in the Daylight Gallery of Peggy Guggenheim's The Art of This Century gallery on Manhattan. Later this year, Guggenheim closes the gallery and Pollock produces the first of his Drip Paintings, the series that brings him international acclaim, in the Springs, East Hampton, New York.
• February 12 – Christian Dior introduces The "New Look" in women's fashion, in Paris.
• October 2 – São Paulo Museum of Art opens to the public in Brazil.
• October – Anthony Blunt takes office as director of the Courtauld Institute of Art in the University of London.
• Journalist Tancrede Marcil Jr. coins the term Les Automatistes in a review of their Montreal exhibition.
• Norman Rockwell produces the first of his Four Seasons calendar illustrations for Brown & Bigelow.
• Lebanese woman painter Saloua Raouda Choucair stages what is perhaps the Arab world's first abstract art exhibition, at the Arab Cultural Gallery in Beirut.
• Béla Hamvas and his wife Katalin write Forradalom a művészetben: Absztrakció és szürrealizmus Magyarországon.
• Robert Woods Bliss acquires the Dumbarton Oaks birthing figure.

  Awards

• Archibald Prize: William Dargie – Sir Marcus Clark, KBE

  Works

• Paul Delvaux – The Great Sirens
• Sir Russell Drysdale – Sofala
• M. C. Escher
• * Another World
• * Crystal
• * Up and Down
• Alberto Giacometti
• * Man Pointing
• * Man Walking
• * Hand
• Jean Hélion – A Rebours
• Alfred Janes – Little Cactus
• Louis le Brocquy – Travelling Woman with Newspaper
• Henri Matisse
• * Deux fillettes, fond jaune et rouge
• * Le Lanceur De Couteaux
• Sidney Nolan – The Trial
• José Clemente Orozco – watercolor illustrations for John Steinbeck's The Pearl
• Eduardo Paolozzi – I was a Rich Man's Plaything
• Bill Traylor – Construction with Figures and Animals
• Andrew Wyeth – Wind from the Sea

  Births

• January 9 – Ronnie Landfield, American abstract painter
• January 27 – Cal Schenkel, American painter and illustrator
• February 14 – Ed Hamilton, American sculptor
• March 12 – Kalervo Palsa, Finnish artist
• March 27 – Daphne Todd, English portrait painter
• March 29 – Sarah Charlesworth, American conceptual artist and photographer
• April 7 – Peggy Cooper Cafritz, born Pearl Alice Cooper, African American art collector
• April 17 – Sherrie Levine, American appropriation artist
• April 20 – Vladimír Novák, Czech painter
• June 1 – Anna Hofman-Uddgren, Swedish actress, cabaret singer, music hall and revue artist and theatre and film director
• June 5 – Laurie Anderson, American experimental performance artist and musician
• June 15 – John Hoagland, American photographer
• July 27 - Shalom Tomáš Neuman, Czech born American sculptor and painter
• December – Richard Amsel, American illustrator and graphic designer
• date unknown
• * Louise Lawler, American photographer
• * Dona Nelson, American abstract painter

  Deaths

• January 14 – MacDonald Gill, English designer
• January 23 – Pierre Bonnard, French painter and printmaker
• March 2 – Stanhope Forbes, English painter of the Newlyn school
• March 19 – Prudence Heward, Canadian painter
• March 25 – Chen Cheng-po, Taiwanese painter
• April 21 – Gustave Van de Woestijne, Belgian Expressionist painter
• May 25 – Rupert Bunny, Australian painter
• June 9 – Augusto Giacometti, Swiss painter
• June 13 – Albert Marquet, French Fauvist painter
• July 25 – Kathleen Scott, British sculptor
• August 9 – Seraphima Blonskaya, Russian painter and art teacher
• September 20 – Edward McCartan, American sculptor
• November 3 – Robert Borlase Smart, English painter and critic
• November 8 – Mariano Benlliure, Spanish sculptor
• November 20 – Georg Kolbe, German sculptor
• December 1 – Samuel Courtauld, English art collector
• December 30 – Han van Meegeren, Dutch painter and art forger