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 · year
1937
Showing 65 works across all media from 1937
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
Their Eyes Were Watching God
1937 · 219 pages
Janie comes home to a Black town in Florida and tells a friend about her three marriages and how she found her own voice. Hurston writes porch talk exactly as it sounded.
★ 8.0
The Hobbit
1937 · 300 pages
Thirteen dwarves turn up at a comfortable hobbit's door and talk him into helping them rob a dragon. The comedy is real, and the riddle game in the dark still frightens children.
★ 7.8
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Directed by David Hand
1937
Disney mortgaged his own house to make the first cel-animated feature, and the industry called it his folly: the queen's transformation still frightens small children exactly as intended.
★ 7.5
The Weeping Woman
1937 · Tate Modern, London
Picasso pulled her out of the screaming mother in Guernica and gave her the face of Dora Maar, his lover and a photographer.
★ 7.5
And then he will carry me away to his castle, where we will live happily ever after.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs · 1937
Of Mice and Men
1937 · 107 pages
George looks after Lennie, huge and slow-witted, across the California ranches, and the two of them keep describing a farm they mean to buy. Steinbeck presses the Depression into that dream.
★ 7.0
The Road to Oxiana
1937 · 291 pages
Byron crossed Persia and Afghanistan in the 1930s hunting domes and minarets, and the diary he kept is funny, rapturous, and cruel about everyone he meets. Paul Fussell called it travel writing's Ulysses.
★ 6.8
Metamorphosis of Narcissus
1937 · Tate Modern, London
The kneeling figure on the left is the same shape as the stone hand on the right, holding an egg with a flower coming out.
★ 6.7
The Cost of Discipleship
1937 · 316 pages
Cheap grace forgives without changing anyone, Bonhoeffer wrote from an outlawed seminary in Nazi Germany. Real grace costs a life: Christ calls a man to come and die. He was hanged in 1945.
★ 6.6
One O'Clock JumpCount Basie
One O'Clock Jump
1937
A head arrangement built section by section, Lester Young and Herschel Evans trading solos, Basie's theme song ever after.
★ 6.6
Out of Africa
1937 · 399 pages
"I had a farm in Africa," Dinesen begins. Seventeen years below the Ngong Hills end in ruined coffee and a forced sale, and she tells it in prose that never asks for sympathy.
★ 6.5
When hearts are high the time will fly, so whistle while you work.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs · 1937
Rickshaw Boy
1937 · 320 pages
Xiangzi pulls a rented rickshaw through 1920s Beijing and wants a cart of his own. Soldiers seize the first he buys, a policeman takes his savings, and Lao She grinds him to nothing.
★ 6.2
Swans Reflecting Elephants
1937 · Private collection
Three swans on a lake, and in the reflection the necks have become trunks and the trees have become legs.
★ 6.1
King of the Delta Blues Singers
1937
Johnson recorded everything he left behind in two sessions, in a hotel room and a warehouse, playing with his face turned to the corner.
★ 6.0
On the Threshold of Liberty
1937 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
A cannon points across a room whose walls are panelled with samples of the world: sky, wood grain, fire, bells, a woman's torso.
★ 5.9
The Blind Owl
1937 · 108 pages
Persian fiction's darkest book: an opium-addicted painter of pen cases draws the same scene, an old man and a girl in black offering a lily, then finds it living behind his wall.
★ 5.3
Red Hills with Flowers
1937 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Red New Mexico hills roll across the canvas with a few flowers brought right up close, the vast and the fragile in one frame.
★ 5.2
Capricious Forms
1937 · Guggenheim, New York City
The Bauhaus grids and circles have given way to floating amoebas. Kandinsky in Paris at the end, inventing a biology instead.
★ 4.8
The Awful Truth
Directed by Leo McCarey
1937
Cary Grant became Cary Grant in this film: Leo McCarey threw out the script daily and improvised on set, and a divorcing couple sabotage each other's new engagements out of pure spite.
★ 4.2
I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.
Second Inaugural Address of Franklin D. Roosevelt · 1937
Their Eyes Were Watching God · 1937
Second Inaugural Address of Franklin D. Roosevelt · 1937
Angel, ha! She's a female! And all females is poison! They're full of wicked wiles!
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs · 1937
Second Inaugural Address of Franklin D. Roosevelt · 1937
Second Inaugural Address of Franklin D. Roosevelt · 1937
Palko v. Connecticut · 1937
As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.
The Road to Wigan Pier · 1937