1897  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

The Sleeping Gypsy (1897) by Henri Rousseau

Nocturne au parc royal de Bruxelles (1897) - William Degouve de Nuncques

Negroes Fighting in a Tunnel at Night (1882) by Paul Bilhaud, here shown in the 1887 version appropriated by Alphonse Allais as published in Album primo-avrilesque (April fool-ish Album)

Funeral March for the Obsequies of a Deaf Man first appears in print

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1897 (MDCCCXCVII) is the 897th year of the 2nd millennium, the 97th year of the 19th century, and the 8th year of the 1890s decade.

Art and culture

• Scientific-Humanitarian Committee is established by Magnus Hirschfeld, President. Hirschfeld tries to ban paragraph 175 of the Prussian penal code which bans homosexuality
• Grand Guignol theater opens in Paris

Music

• "Funeral March for the Obsequies of a Deaf Man" by Alphonse Allais first appears in print

Literature

Fiction

• The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells
• Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard by Stéphane Mallarmé
• Dracula by Bram Stoker
• La Ronde written by Schnitzler, not performed until 1920
• The Secret Rose by W. B. Yeats

Non-fiction

• What Is Art? by Tolstoy
• Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 by Havelock Ellis is published, an investigation of human sexual practices. It is banned by a judge in Britain as "filth masquerading as science."
• Officiorum ac Munerum, a list of forbidden books by Pope Leo XIII.

Visual arts

• Hofatelier Elvira, Munich by August Endell
• Intimacies by Félix Vallotton is published
• Album primo-avrilesque (April Foolish Album), a portfolio of seven monochromatic images by French artist Alphonse Allais.
• The Vampire, a painting by the British painter Philip Burne-Jones (1861 – 1926).
• The Sleeping Gypsy by Henri Rousseau
• "Artichoke" wallpaper[1], by John Henry Dearle for William Morris & Co.
• Femmes damnées by Carlos Schwabe
• Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, a painting by Paul Gauguin

Film

Births

• Unknown: William Mortensen, American photographer (d. 1965)
• March 11 – Henry Cowell, American avant-garde composer (d. 1965)
• March 24 – Wilhelm Reich, Austrian psychotherapist (d. 1957)
• March 25 – Jean Epstein, French film director and film theoretician (d. 1953)
• April 17 – Thornton Wilder, American dramatist (d. 1975)
• April 26 – Douglas Sirk, German-born director (d. 1987)
• May 14 – Sidney Bechet, American musician (d. 1959)
• May 18 – Frank Capra, American producer, director, and writer (d. 1991)
• September 10 – Georges Bataille, French writer, anthropologist, archivist and philosopher (d. 1962)
• September 25 – William Faulkner, American writer, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1962)
• October 3 – Louis Aragon, French author (d. 1982)
• October 29 – Joseph Goebbels, German Nazi propagandist (d. 1945)

Deaths

• April 3 – Johannes Brahms, German composer (b. 1833)
• September 30 – St Thérèse de Lisieux, French Catholic saint (b. 1873)
• December 17 – Alphonse Daudet, French writer (b. 1840)