January 31 – The Art Gallery of Hamilton is founded.
March – The London Group hold their first exhibition, at the Goupil Gallery.
March–June – Rebel Art Centre run in London by Wyndham Lewis and others.
March 10 – Suffragette Mary Richardson damages the Velázquez painting Rokeby Venus (c. 1651) in the National Gallery, London, with a meat cleaver.
April
Umberto Boccioni publishes Manifesto tecnico della scultura futurista ("Technical manifesto of futurist sculpture"); later this year he also publishes the book Pittura e scultura futuriste (dinamismo plastico) ("Futurist painting and sculpture").
August Macke, Louis Moilliet and Paul Klee travel in Tunisia.
April 20 – English artist Dorothy Shakespear marries American poet Ezra Pound at St Mary Abbots church, Kensington, London.
May 4 – Suffragette Mary Wood attacks John Singer Sargent's portrait of Henry James at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in London with a meat cleaver. At the same exhibition on May 12, Gertrude Mary Ansell attacks the recently-deceased Hubert von Herkomer's portrait of the Duke of Wellington, and on May 26 'Mary Spencer' (Maude Kate Smith) attacks George Clausen's painting Primavera.
June – First issue (of two) published of the Vorticist literary magazine BLAST edited by Wyndham Lewis.
July 17 – Suffragette Annie Hunt damages Sir John Millais' portrait of Thomas Carlyle (1877) in the National Portrait Gallery, London, with a meat cleaver.
August – Fernand Léger is mobilised for service in the French Army; he serves in the Forest of Argonne.
September 5 – The cover of magazine London Opinion first carries the iconic drawing by Alfred Leete of Lord Kitchener with the recruiting slogan Your Country Needs You.
November 16 – The Baltimore Museum of Art is founded at Johns Hopkins University.
The Bilbao Fine Arts Museum (Museo de Bellas Artes) is established in Bilbao.
Futurist exhibition at the Doré Gallery in London.
Clive Bell publishes his formalist study Art.
Publication of Vincent van Gogh's letters to his brother Theo.
Nina Hamnett and Amedeo Modigliani meet for the first time in Montparnasse.