Capa, Cartier-Bresson and others found Magnum, a cooperative of leading photographers running their own picture agency

Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti begins to develop his characteristic style of tense elongated bronze sculpture

Francis Poulenc makes an opera of Guillaume Apollinaire's play Les Mamelles de Tirésias ('The Breasts of Tiresias')

Bertolt Brecht's play The Life of Galileo has its premiere in Los Angeles with Charles Laughton in the lead

Hungarian-born British engineer Dennis Gabor creates the first three-dimensional image from reflected light, subsequently known as a hologram

J.B. Priestley challenges audiences with An Inspector Calls, a play in which moral guilt spreads like an infection

French designer Christian Dior introduces the 'New Look', a lavish feminine style of dress welcomed by all after wartime austerity

Italian author Primo Levi publishes If This Is a Man, based on his experiences in Auschwitz

Jean-Louis Barrault and his wife Madeleine Renaud establish their own company at the Théâtre Marigny in Paris

An armed coup, led by Klement Gottwald, imposes single-party Communist rule in Czechoslovakia

British dancer Robert Helpmann choreographs the ballet scenes in the film The Red Shoes, featuring Moira Shearer

The Morris Minor is launched, designed by Alec Issigonis, and becomes one of Britain's best-selling cars

Ezra Pound publishes Pisan Cantos, about his postwar imprisonment in an American detention centre near Pisa

Christopher Fry's verse drama The Lady's Not For Burning engages in high-spirited poetic word play

Vittorio de Sica directs the film Bicycle Thieves, a classic of Italian neorealism

Richard Strauss completes his Four Last Songs in the year before his death

British astronomer Fred Hoyle puts forward a 'steady-state' theory of the universe, in which matter is continually created

Tito accepts Marshall Aid from the USA, setting Yugoslavia on the path of non-alignment in the Cold War

The World Council of Churches is established in Amsterdam – a significant step in the ecumenical movement

Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears together establish an annual festival in the Suffolk seaside town of Aldeburgh

Swiss-born French architect Le Corbusier introduces the Modulor, an architectural unit based on the Golden Section

French composer Pierre Schaeffer writes the first pieces of musique concrète, and coins the term

Olivier Messiaen completes Turangaîlila-symphonie, a symphony in ten movements for an orchestra including ondes martenot

Frederick Ashton's Cinderella, to music by Prokofiev, is the first full-length ballet by an English choreographer

The Soviet Union imposes a blockade on Berlin by denying the other powers access through the land corridor to the city