The Art Story.org - Your guide to modern art

Founding of Hague School of
painting; in existence until 1890

A group of fourteen students leave
the Imperial Academy of Arts, Russia,
forming independent artistic society
known as the “Peredvizhniki”

Establishment of Moscow School
of Painting, Sculpture and
Architecture, one of largest
educational institutions in Russia

Leo Tolstoy’s War
and Peace published

Peredvizhniki form the
Association of Traveling
Exhibitions, in existence
until 1923

First Impressionist
exhibition, Paris

Eighth and last
Impressionist
exhibition, Paris

Berlin Secession founded as
alternative to conservative,
state-run Association of Berlin Artists

Jews granted civil
rights in every
part of Germany,
except Bavaria

Jews emancipated
in England

Jews given equal rights in
Russian-controlled Congress Poland

Ku Klux Klan organized to
maintain "white supremacy"

Jews emancipated in Germany

Start of first major wave
of pogroms in Russia and
Ukraine; lasts until 1884

Beginning of wave of mass
emigration of Russian Jews,
which between now and 1920
totals two million individuals

The First Aliyah, first major
wave of Jewish immigrants to
build a homeland in Palestine;
lasts until 1903

Educational Alliance
founded on New
York’s Lower East
Side to assist
Eastern European
immigrants

French artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus
tried and convicted of treason based
on fabricated evidence—an event
later known as the Dreyfus Affair

First Zionist Congress held in Basel, Switzerland

Emancipation of
Russian serfs

January Uprising: Polish-Lithuanan
Commonwealth’s revolt against
the Russian Empire

Austro-Prussian War, which results in
dissolution of German Confederation and
creation of North German Confederation
and Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy

Franco-Prussian War;
lasts until 1871

Russo-Turkish War;
ends in 1878

Tsar Alexander II
assassinated

France and the Russian
Empire sign military alliance

Russian critic Vladimir Stasov
and artist Mark Antokolsky begin
exploring concept of developing
a handicraft-inspired Jewish art

Beginning of strict quotas on Jews
in Russian educational institutions;
culminates in establishment of
formal quota system in 1887

Sholem Aleichem begins writing first
episode of life of Tevye the Dairyman

First Jewish museum
opens in Vienna

Yehuda Pen founds first Jewish art
school in Russian Empire, School
of Drawing and Painting, in Vitebsk

The Russo-Japanese War—“the
first great war of the twentieth
century”—begins; ends in 1905

Russian Revolution of 1905

Peak year for European immigration
to the United States, with roughly
1,285,000 individuals entering the country

Archduke Franz Ferdinand
assassinated, leading to
start of World War I

February Revolution in Russia;
three hundred-year-long-Romanov
dynasty overturned, and Provisional
Government established in its place

U.S. enters World War I

October Revolution, leading
to formation of Bolshevik state

World War I
ends

Amedeo Modigliani arrives in Paris, among
the many foreign artists to resettle in
this city in the early decades of the
twentieth century and form what comes to
be known as the “Ecole de Paris”

Armory Show in New York

Kazimir Malevich creates costume
and set designs for the opera Victory
over the Sun, a major milestone
toward founding of Suprematism

El Lissitzky creates his first
Proun, an acronym for “Project
for the Affirmation of the New.”

Start of second major
wave of pogroms;
lasts until 1906

Kishinev Massacre,
in which forty-nine
Jews murdered and
hundreds wounded

St. Petersburg newspaper
publishes anti-Semitic
literary hoax The
Protocols of the Elders
of Zion, purportedly
describing Jewish plan
for world domination

Blood libel case Beilis
Affair begins in Russia;
lasts until 1913

American Jewish Relief Committee established
to distribute funds to needy Jews; later
combined with other Jewish relief organizations
to become Joint Distribution Committee

Provisional Government
abolishes Pale of
Settlement and grants
Jews full rights in Russia

Balfour Declaration gives
official British support
for "the establishment in
Palestine of a national
home for the Jewish people”

Start of third major wave
of pogroms; lasts until 1920

Magazine Ost und West, which
regularly features articles
on East and West European Jewish
artists, founded in Berlin

Bezalel School, which lends
name to first Israeli art
movement, founded in Jerusalem

Jewish Historical and Ethnographic
Society founded in St. Petersburg

Start of Semyon An-sky–led
expedition to Ukraine, Podolia,
and Volhynia to collect Jewish
religious and folk objects

Russian Jewish artists in
Paris publish first Jewish
art journal, Makhmadim

Jewish Society for the
Encouragement of the
Arts formed in Petrograd

Hebrew theater Habimah
founded in Moscow

Yiddish cultural organization
Kultur Lige established in Kiev

State Jewish Chamber
Theater founded in Moscow

Soviet Union
officially
established

Passage of Immigration Act in
U.S., aimed, like the Emergency
Quota Art of 1921, at restricting
the flow of Southern and Eastern
Europeans into the country

Adolf Hitler
publishes Mein Kampf

Stock Market crash,
signaling the start
of the Great Depression

Franklin D. Roosevelt
elected U.S. President

Comintern announces policy
of Popular Front in response
to rising threat of fascism

Spanish Civil War starts

Anschluss: Nazi Germany
annexes Austria

Germany invades
Poland, starting
World War II

Start of German occupation
of Paris; collaborationist
Vichy regime established

Japanese forces bomb
Pearl Harbor; U.S.
enters World War II

World War II
ends

Term “Ecole de Paris” coined
to describe group of foreign
painters that resettled in the
city in the years preceding and
immediately following World War I

Museum of Modern Art
opens in New York

Nazis close
down the Bauhaus

Socialist Realism
proclaimed as only
permissible style
of Soviet art

Roosevelt administration
creates Works Progress
Administration and Farm
Security Administration

Walter Benjamin writes “The
Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction”

Paris Exposition Internationale
des Arts et Techniques dans la
Vie Moderne (“Paris World’s Fair)

Works Progress
Administration closes

Farm Security
Administration closes

Adolf Hitler comes to power
in Germany, leading to a mass
exodus of Jews, mostly to neighboring
countries, particularly France

Soviet government establishes
Jewish Autonomous Oblast
in Birobidzhan to give Jews
their own “unity of territory”

Kristallnacht: Jews
attacked throughout Nazi
Germany and parts of
Austria, November 9–10

Jewish refugees on SS.
St. Louis denied American
sanctuary by the U.S.
government, forcing the
ship’s return to Europe

News of systematic
extermination of
Jews in Nazi death
camps reaches
throughout the world

Nazi death camps
liberated by
Allied forces

Nuremburg Trials
begin

As part of Popular Front policy,
American Artists’ Congress
founded to unite graphic artists
to help combat the spread of fascism

The Ten, a group of consisting
almost exclusively of Jewish
artists, formed in New York

Degenerate Art Exhibition

Under Vichy regime, Jewish artists
forbidden from exhibiting in Paris

German Jewish writer Walter
Benjamin commits suicide

Marc Chagall and Jacques Lipchitz
flee Nazi-controlled France for
the U.S., among the many European
artists and intellectuals so
helped by Varian Fry and
Emergency Relief Committee

NATO formed

Germany divided into West
Germany (Federal Republic of
Germany) and East Germany
(German Democratic Republic)

U.S. explodes first hydrogen bomb

Dwight D. Eisenhower
elected U.S. President

Joseph Stalin dies

Treaty of Rome signed,
leading to formation of
European Economic
Community
the following year

Nikita Khrushchev
appointed Soviet Premier

Fidel Castro becomes
Prime Minister of Cuba

John F. Kennedy elected U.S. President

Bay of Pigs invasion

Berlin Wall established

Cuban Missile Crisis

JFK assassinated; Lyndon
B. Johnson succeeds
to U.S. presidency

Leonid Brezhnev takes over
as leader of Soviet Union

Women’s Strike for Equality
held throughout U.S.

House Un-American Activities Committee holds
nine days of hearings into alleged Communist
influence in the Hollywood motion-picture industry

Barnett Newman paints Onement I

Jackson Pollock creates
some of his most
famous drip paintings

Harold
Rosenberg’s
essay “American
Action Painters”
appears in
ARTnews

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita published
in Paris; appears in New York in 1958

Jackson Pollock dies in car crash

Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor
Zhivago first published;
Pasternak awarded Nobel Prize
for it the following year

Andy Warhol stages his
first Pop art exhibition

First Fluxus event held
at AG Gallery, New York

Joseph Kosuth creates
One and Three Chairs

Survey of Minimalism,
Primary Structures,
at the Jewish Museum,
New York

Joseph Kosuth’s
essay "Art After
Philosophy" published

Major Conceptual Art exhibitions,
Information (Museum of Modern
Art, New York) and Software
Jewish Museum, New York)

Robert Smithson
creates Spiral Jetty

Hermann Goring commits suicide
two hours before scheduled
execution of first major group
of Nazi war criminals at Nuremburg

General Assembly of the United Nations adopts
partition plan for Palestine, calling for
division into Jewish and Arab states, with
Jerusalem-Bethlehem to be administered by the UN

Soviet regime launches campaign
against "rootless cosmopolitans"

Israel established as independent Jewish state
hours before British Mandate is due to expire

Within hours of its founding, Israel
attacked by Syria, Iraq, Transjordan,
Lebanon, and Egypt; attack is repulsed,
and Israel conquers more territory

Following its nationalization of Suez Canal,
Egypt blockades the Gulf of Aqaba, closing the
Suez Canal to Israeli shipping. Israel, England,
and France go to war and force Egypt to end
blockade and open the canal to all nations

Adolf Eichmann
captured in
Argentina by Israeli
Secret Service

Eichmann tried in Jerusalem
for crimes against the
Jewish people, crimes
against humanity, and war
crimes; hanged In Ramla,
the following year

Vatican II revolutionizes
Christian-Jewish relations

Six-Day War between Israel
and neighboring states of
Egypt, Jordan, and Syria

Primo Levi publishes If This Is a Man,
account of his year as a prisoner at Auschwitz

Yad Vashem, Israel’ official
memorial to the Jewish victims
of the Holocaust, established
through Yad Vashem Law passed
by the Knesset

Alain Resnais directs French
documentary short film Night and Fog,
featuring abandoned grounds of Auschwitz
and Majdanek and describing
lives of prisoners in the camps

Elie Wiesel’s account of his and
his father’s experiences as
prisoners at Auschwitz and Buchenwald,
appears in France as La Nuit;
published in U.S. as Night in 1960

Hannah Arendt, a Jew who
fled Germany during Adolf
Hitler's rise to power and
reported on the Eichmann
trial for The New Yorker,
publishes Eichmann
in Jerusalem

Harold Rosenberg, major art critic
associated with Abstract Expressionism,
delivers talk “Is There a Jewish Art?”
at New York’s Jewish Museum

SALT I agreement signed by
Nixon and Brezhnev, leading
to improved relations between
U.S. and Soviet Union

Richard M. Nixon
elected U.S. President

Roe v. Wade

U.S. military involvement
in Vietnam War ends

Vietnam War ends

SALT II Treaty signed by Jimmy
Carter and Leonid Brezhnev

Ronald Reagan elected U.S. President

Leonid Brezhnev dies

Mikhail Gorbachev
becomes head of
Soviet Union

Fall of Berlin Wall

Collapse of Soviet Union,
marking the end of the Cold War

Boris Yeltsin becomes first
President of the Russian Federation

Bill Clinton elected
U.S. President

Bill Clinton reelected
U.S. President

Linda Nochlin publishes
groundbreaking essay “Why
Have There Been No Great
Women Artists?” in ArtNews

Joseph Beuys stages
groundbreaking performance
I Like America and America
Likes Me at Rene Block
Gallery, New York

First issue of the
feminist art magazine
Heresies published

Pablo Picasso's
Guernica(1937)
sent to Madrid,
after being on
extended loan at
New York's MoMA
since 1939

Christo and Jeanne-Claude complete one
of their major projects, Surrounded
Islands, in which they surround
islands in Miami’s Biscayne Bay
with pink polypropylene fabric

Following eight-year-long
controversy surrounding
Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc
(1981), the sculpture is
dismantled and then consigned
to a New York warehouse

Vincent Van Gogh’s Portrait
of Dr. Gachet (1890) sells
at Christie’s auction
for $82.5 million

The exhibition Sensation: Young
British Artists from the Charles
Saatchi Collection provokes
major scandal in New York, after
previous scandal in London

Start of large-scale emigration
of Jews from Soviet Union, when
about 13,000 Soviet Jews and
their relatives leave the country

Munich Massacre: members of Israeli
Olympic team taken hostage and
then killed at Munich Olympics by members
of Palestinian group Black September

Yom Kippur War

Comprehensive peace treaty Camp
David Accords signed by Israeli
Prime Minister Menachem Begin and
Egyptian President Anwar Sadat

Start of First Intifada,
Palestinian uprising
against Israeli occupation
of Palestinian Territories

Madrid Conference, early
international attempt to
launch Middle East
peace process

Oslo Accords, an outgrowth of Madrid
Conference, seeking to resolve
Palestinian-Israeli conflict; signed
in presence of PLO chairman
Yasser Arafat, Israeli
Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin,
and U.S. President Bill Clinton

Yitzhak Rabin assassinated

Jewish artists’ group Aleph
formed in Leningrad to
exhibit “a group of works
linked to the spirit and life
of the Jewish people and its
national and cultural traditions

Isaac Bashevis Singer awarded
Nobel Prize in Literature

French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann
completes Shoah, nine-hour thirty-six
minute documentary film about the Holocaust

Elie Wiesel wins
Nobel Peace Prize

Steven Spielberg directs Schindler's
List, about the German businessman
who saved the lives of more than a
thousand mostly Polish-Jewish
refugees during the Holocaust

United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum, official U.S. memorial to
the Holocaust, opens in Washington,
D.C., adjacent to the National Mall