December: Calder takes Lithography with Charles Locke at the League. (ASL, registration records)

Winter: Calder travels to Florida. First he visits Miami, then Sarasota, where he sketches at the winter grounds of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus.

January: Artists Gallery, New York, includes an oil painting by Calder in a group exhibition. Murdock Pemberton, the art critic for the New Yorker, comments on the exhibition: A. Calder, too, we think is a good bet. (CF, exhibition file; Pemberton, New Yorker, 2 January)

Winter: While sharing an apartment with Alexander Brook, assistant director of the Whitney Studio Club, Calder embellishes the Brook children's "Humpty Dumpty Circus." He adds movement and articulation to the store-bought toys, making an elephant "go round a circle" and a mechanism that could "hoist a clown on his back." (CF, Calder 1955-1956, 44; Calder 1966, 80)

27 February: American painter Walter Kuhn organizes a stag dinner at the Union Square Volunteer Fire Brigade, Tip Toe Inn, New York, in honor of Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi's first visit to the United States. Calder paints Firemen's Dinner for Brancusi commemorating the event. (AAA, Louis Bouche Papers, dinner invitation; Marter 1976)

Before 5 March: Calder sketches a human dissection at Physicians and Surgeons Hospital. I drew for several hours and subsequently painted The Stiff...I went to a party that evening and kept asking if I did not smell of forma(h)ldehide--my hair, particularly. They said 'no'--but the odor was with me--and although I really intended returning, I never did. (CF, Calder 1955-1956, 51)

5-28 March: Calder exhibits The Stiff at the "Tenth Annual Exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists," Waldorf Astoria, New York. (CF, exhibition file)

8-20 March: Calder exhibits an oil painting at the "Whitney Studio Club Eleventh Annual Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture by Members of the Club," Anderson Galleries, New York. (CF, exhibition file)

Spring: At his friend Betty Salemme's house on a lake near Sherman, Connecticut, Calder carves his first wood sculpture, Flat Cat, from an oak fence post. (CF, Calder 1955-1956, 174)

Spring: Calder moves into a tiny, one-room apartment on Fourteenth Street, west of Seventh Avenue. There he makes his first wire sculpture, a sundial in the form of a "rooster on a vertical rod with radiating lines at the foot" to demarcate the hours. (Calder 1966, 71-72)