The part-time English painter L.S. Lowry begins a lifetime career in a Manchester property company

Walter Sickert and other painters, sharing his preference for everyday subjects, adopt the name Camden Town Group

Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa is stolen from the Louvre in Paris

The painters Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc and others form Der Blaue Reiter

Egon Schiele's highly explicit images of nudes land him briefly in gaol

Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No.2 creates a stir

Georges Braque's Fruit-Dish and Glass adds papier collé (a type of collage) to the conventions of cubism

Guillaume Apollinaire coins the term Orphism for Robert Delaunay's distinctive style of abstraction

Giacomo Balla attempts to paint movement in his futurist Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash

Walter Sickert paints Ennui, depicting a difficult or dreary moment in a marriage

The cubist movement enters its second phase, deriving from the use of collage and known as Synthetic cubism

Leonardo's Mona Lisa is recovered two years after its theft when the thief, Vincenzo Perugia, tries to sell it to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence

Wyndham Lewis and others launch Vorticism with a new magazine, Blast

The Russian painter and sculptor Vladimir Tatlin develops an abstract style to which he gives the name Constructivism

Stanley Spencer joins the Royal Army Medical Corps, with whom he finds a wealth of subject matter

Kasimir Malevich exhibits his painting Black Square in Petrograd, in the final Futurist exhibition

The Irish painter Jack Yeats develops a romantic Expressionist style, with a new interest in Celtic myth

Claude Monet begins the great cyclorama of water-lilies, Nympheas, that he donates to the French nation

The French poet Guillaume Apollinaire is the first to use the term Surrealism

Amedeo Modigliani's first Paris exhibition is immediately closed by the police because it contains paintings of nudes

Piet Mondrian and other Dutch artists establish the movement known as De Stijl, together with a magazine of the same name

The Russian artist Kasimir Malevich begins a series of White on White paintings

The phrase Abstract Expressionism is first used, describing the work of Wassily Kandinsky

John Singer Sargent completes Gassed, a powerful image of one of the particular horrors of the recent war

Artists dedicated to celebrating the Canadian landscape come together as the Group of Seven