1917

Showing 38 works across all media from 1917

Sculpture · Dada

Fountain

Marcel Duchamp

1917

Duchamp submitted a porcelain urinal signed R. Mutt to an exhibition he was helping to judge, and the committee rejected it.

★ 9.5

Nude painting

Red Nude

Amedeo Modigliani

1917 · Private collection

The police shut down Modigliani's only solo show for indecency, and this was among the nudes that did it.

★ 6.8

Jazz standard · Jazz

Livery Stable Blues

Original Dixieland Jazz Band

1917

Barnyard imitations from clarinet, cornet and trombone, waxed for Victor in February 1917: the first jazz record commercially released.

★ 6.4

Nude painting

Reclining Nude

Amedeo Modigliani

1917 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

African masks, Cycladic figures and Renaissance Venuses, folded into one long golden diagonal. Among the most expensive paintings ever sold.

★ 6.3

Lecture · Psychological literature

We believe that civilization has been created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of satisfaction of the instincts.

Sigmund Freud

Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis · 1917

★ 6.3

Nonfiction · Political philosophy

The State and Revolution

Vladimir Lenin

1917 · 122 pages

The state is one class crushing another, so workers must smash the machine, not inherit it. Lenin wrote it weeks before seizing Russia, and communist parties from Moscow to Beijing governed by it.

★ 6.1

Portrait

Portrait of Jean Cocteau

Amedeo Modigliani

1917 · Private collection

Cocteau sits stiffly upright with his neck drawn long, one of the sharpest personalities in Paris turned into an elegant mask.

★ 5.4

Speech · Political speech

The world must be made safe for democracy.

Woodrow Wilson

1917

★ 5.4

Psychological literature

If a man has been his mother's undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success with it.

Sigmund Freud

1917

★ 5.3

Religious painting · New objectivity

Descent from the Cross (Beckmann)

Max Beckmann

1917 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City

Beckmann came out of the war traumatized and painted a Christ so emaciated and angular that no consolation survives the picture.

★ 5.2

Novel

Call no man foe, but never love a stranger.

Stella Benson

This is the End · 1917

★ 3.6

Speech · Political speech

We realize that the greatest things that remain to be done must be done with the whole world for stage and in cooperation with the wide and universal forces of mankind, and we are making our spirits ready for those things.

Woodrow Wilson

Second Inaugural Address of Woodrow Wilson · 1917

★ 3.6

Poem

Beauty for some provides escape, Who gain a happiness in eyeing The gorgeous buttocks of the ape Or autumn sunsets exquisitely dying.

Aldous Huxley

1917

★ 3.5

Poem

Out where the handclasp's a little stronger, Out where the smile dwells a little longer, That's where the West begins.

Arthur Chapman

Out Where the West Begins · 1917

★ 3.5

To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.

G.K. Chesterton

1917

★ 3.5

Play

When a man wanted to make a machine that would walk, he created the wheel, which does not resemble a leg.

Guillaume Apollinaire

1917

★ 3.5

Poem

I have come to the borders of sleep, The unfathomable deep Forest where all must lose Their way.

Edward Thomas

1917

★ 3.5

Patriotic

Over There

American Quartet

1917

Cohan wrote it on his morning commute in April 1917, and two million copies of sheet music followed.

★ 3.4

I believe in the United States of America as a government of the people, by the people, for the people, whose just powers are derived from the consent of the governed; a democracy in a republic; a sovereign Nation of many sovereign States; a perfect Union, one and inseparable, established upon those principles of freedom, equality, justice, and humanity for which American patriots sacrificed their lives and fortunes. I therefore believe it is my duty to my country to love it, to support its Constitution, to obey its laws, to respect its flag, and to defend it against all enemies.

William Tyler Page

1917

★ 3.4

I think all men recognize that in time of war the citizen must surrender some rights for the common good which he is entitled to enjoy in time of peace. But, sir, the right to control their own government according to constitutional forms is not one of the rights that the citizens of this country are called upon to surrender in time of war.

Robert M. La Follette

1917

★ 3.4