March 20 – The Berlin Fire Brigade is ordered to burn around 5000 works of graphic art considered by the ruling Nazi Party in Germany to be "degenerate art" and which have little market value.
May – Release of Detective Comics #27, the debut of Batman.
September – Artworks from the Louvre and other French museums are evacuated to the Château de Chambord.
November 6 – Mexican painters' Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera's brief divorce is finalized.
November 7 – The War Artists' Advisory Committee of the Ministry of Information (United Kingdom) is appointed, following a scheme put forward by Sir Kenneth Clark on August 29, first meeting on November 23 to decide which war artists it will employ.
December 14 – A 'Scheme for recording changing aspects of Britain' which will employ British watercolour painters during World War II is put forward by Sir Kenneth Clark for support by the Pilgrim Trust.
English painters Kenneth Hall and his lover Basil Rakoczi of The White Stag group move from London to Ireland following the outbreak of war.
Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth settle near St Ives, Cornwall, effectively establishing the St Ives School of abstract avant-garde artists. Henry Moore subsequently takes over Hepworth's London studio.
Picasso retrospective curated by Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and staged jointly by the Museum of Modern Art (New York) and the Art Institute of Chicago opens.
Exhibition "Contemporary Unknown American Painters" at the Museum of Modern Art (New York) introduces Grandma Moses to the public.
First of the Madeline books, illustrated by Ludwig Bemelmans.
Harvey Fite begins work on his environmental sculpture Opus 40 at Saugerties, New York.
Awards
Archibald Prize: Max Meldrum – The Hon G J Bell, Speaker of the House of Representatives
Works
Maurice Ascalon – The Scholar, The Laborer, and The Toiler of the Soil (beaten copper relief sculpture for Jewish Palestine Pavilion at 1939 New York World's Fair)
Alexander Calder – Lobster Trap and Fish Tail (mobile)
Salvador Dalí – Shirley Temple, The Youngest, Most Sacred Monster of the Cinema in Her Time
Paul Delvaux – The Phases of the Moon I
Aaron Douglas – Power Plant, Harlem
James Earle Fraser – Equestrian Statue of Theodore Roosevelt
Leo Friedlander – Pioneer Woman (sculpture)
Julio González – Monsieur Cactus (sculpture)
Edward Hopper – Cape Cod Evening
Frida Kahlo
The Earth Itself (later known as Two Nudes in the Forest)
The Two Fridas
Fernand Léger – Adam and Eve
David Low – Rendezvous (political cartoon)
Musa McKim – Spanish Hill and the Early Inhabitants of the Vicinity (mural at United States Post Office (Waverly, New York))
Marino Marini – The Pilgrim (bronze)
Joan Miró – Constellations (series begun)
Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen – The Young Man playing Pan-pipes on a Wingless Pegasus (monument to the sculptor's husband, the composer Carl Nielsen (d. 1931), in Copenhagen)
José Clemente Orozco – Man of Fire (fresco in Hospicio Cabañas, Guadalajara, Mexico, 1936-39)
