Guernica
1937 · Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid
A screaming horse, a mother with her dead child, all in grey. Picasso painted it in weeks after German bombers leveled a Basque town.
★ 9.9
Browse by time · decade
1930s
1930 – 1939
Showing 493 works across all media from the 1930s
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
First Inaugural Address of Franklin D. Roosevelt · 1933
Strange Fruit
1939
A Bronx schoolteacher's poem about lynching, sung in a single spotlight, still the bravest three minutes on record.
★ 9.6
City Lights
Directed by Charlie Chaplin
1931
Chaplin's own favorite of his films, and the one people cry at: he refused to make it a talkie, then built ninety minutes toward a final thirty seconds.
★ 9.3
The Collected Poems
1939 · 544 pages
Irish myth and fairy tale at the start, then old age, politics, and desire handled with frightening force. Yeats wrote things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, and a terrible beauty is born.
★ 9.1
The Wizard of Oz
Directed by Victor Fleming
1939
Decades of television broadcasts made it what the Library of Congress calls the most-seen film in history: the switch from sepia Kansas into Technicolor Oz still lands like a door opening.
★ 9.1
Over the Rainbow
1939
MGM cut it from the film twice until Arthur Freed threatened to quit; Garland was sixteen.
★ 9.0
Absalom, Absalom!
1936 · 313 pages
Thomas Sutpen arrives in Mississippi from nowhere with a band of slaves and a French architect and builds a dynasty that destroys itself. Two students retell it until it swallows them.
★ 9.0
The Grapes of Wrath
1939 · 464 pages
The Joads lose their Oklahoma farm and drive west to California, where the promised work is a lie. Steinbeck's fury at what was done to them still comes off the page.
★ 9.0
M
Directed by Fritz Lang
1931 · Germany
Serial killer films begin here: Lang used sound as a weapon in his first talkie, gave the murderer a whistled tune, and turned a whole city into a trap.
★ 8.9
The Rules of the Game
Directed by Jean Renoir
1939 · France
Banned in 1939, booed at its premiere, then in the top ten of every Sight and Sound poll for sixty years: Renoir turned a hunting party into a diagnosis of a doomed society.
★ 8.8
Modern Times
Directed by Charlie Chaplin
1936
Chaplin's farewell to silence, made nine years into the sound era out of pure stubbornness: the factory gears swallow him, and he answers the talkies entirely on his own terms.
★ 8.7
The Persistence of Memory
1931 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Dalí said the soft watches came to him from a camembert melting in the sun, and he painted them with hallucinatory precision.
★ 8.7
The Wizard of Oz · 1939
Brave New World
1932 · 281 pages
Babies are decanted from bottles into castes, everyone takes a drug called soma, and nobody is unhappy. Huxley saw that a tyranny of pleasure would hold better than one of fear.
★ 8.5
American Gothic
1930 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Wood posed his sister and his dentist in front of a farmhouse window, and people have argued ever since whether he meant tribute or mockery.
★ 8.3
Sing Sing Sing (With a Swing)
1937
Louis Prima's tune, Krupa's tom-toms, and a performance long enough to fill both sides of a twelve-inch 78.
★ 8.0