1980 in art

Events

• January 1 – Gary Larson's single-panel comic The Far Side debuts in the San Francisco Chronicle.
• February 7 – Pink Floyd's The Wall Tour opens at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena.
• May 22–September 16 – Pablo Picasso Retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the largest and most complete Picasso exhibition ever held in the United States.
• December 8 – Annie Leibovitz photographs John Lennon with Yoko Ono in New York for the cover of Rolling Stone magazine five hours before his murder.
• Robert Hughes presents a series, The Shock of the New, for BBC Television in the United Kingdom on "art and the century of change".
• Benedikt Taschen opens a comic book store in Cologne which will evolve into the art book publisher Taschen.

  Works

• Basil Blackshaw – Green Landscape
• Arbit Blatas – The Monument of the Holocaust
• Alan Chung Hung – Gate to the Northwest Passage
• David Inshaw – The River Bank
• Keith Jellum – Mimir
• Nabil Kanso
• * Apocalyptic Rider
• * Time Suspended in Space
• Peter Kennard – Haywain with Cruise Missiles
• Georgia O'Keeffe – Llama in the Desert
• Bryan Organ – '
• Howard Post – Moving Cattle
• George Segal – '

  Awards

• John Moores Painting Prize - Michael Moon for "Box-room"

  Births

Deaths

January to June

• January 18 – Cecil Beaton, English photographer and stage and costume designer.
• January 20 – William Roberts, painter.
• January 26 – Dolly Rudeman, Dutch graphic designer.
• February 4 – Stojan Aralica, famous Serbian Impressionist painter and academic.
• February 6 – Albert Kotin, Russian-born American Abstract Expressionist artist.
• February 17 – Graham Sutherland, English artist.
• February 22 – Oskar Kokoschka, Austrian artist, poet and playwright.
• March 5 – John Skeaping, English sculptor and equine painter.
• March 18 – Tamara de Lempicka, Polish Art Deco painter.
• April 21
• * Ľudovít Fulla, Slovak painter, graphic artist, illustrator, stage designer and art teacher.
• * Sohrab Sepehri, Persian poet and a painter.
• May 15 – Len Lye, New Zealand-born American kinetic sculptor and filmmaker.
• May 16 – Izis Bidermanas, Lithuanian-born photographer.
• June 7 – Philip Guston, Canadian-born American Abstract Expressionist painter and printmaker.
• June 23 – Clyfford Still, American Abstract Expressionist painter.

  July to December

• July – Robert Brackman, Ukrainian-born American artist and teacher.
• August 26 – Tex Avery, American animator, cartoonist, and director.
• September 14 – Maxwell Bates, Canadian architect and expressionist painter.
• November 22 – Norah McGuinness, Irish painter and illustrator.
• December 26 – Tony Smith, American sculptor, visual artist and theorist on art.
• December 30 – Patrick Hennessy, Irish painter.