• 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 (with accompanying book), 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.

• February 17 until April 6 - "Afro-American Abstraction" (curated by April Kingsley at MoMA PS1 in New York City.^[1]

• Basil Blackshaw – Green Landscape
• Arbit Blatas – The Monument of the Holocaust (reliefs, first edition)
• Alan Chung Hung – Gate to the Northwest Passage (sculpture, Vancouver, British Columbia)
• David Inshaw – The River Bank (Ophelia)
• Keith Jellum – Mimir (sculpture, Portland, Oregon)
• Nabil Kanso
  • Apocalyptic Rider
  • Time Suspended in Space (South Africa)
• Peter Kennard – Haywain with Cruise Missiles
• Georgia O'Keeffe – Llama in the Desert
• Bryan Organ – Harold Macmillan, 1st Earl of Stockton
• Howard Post – Moving Cattle
• George Segal – Gay Liberation (sculpture)

• John Moores Painting Prize - Michael Moon for "Box-room"^[2]

January to June edit

• January 9 – Joy Adamson, Austria-Kenyan painter and conservationist (b. 1908).^[3]
• January 18 – Cecil Beaton, English photographer and stage and costume designer (b. 1904).
• January 20 – William Roberts, painter (b. 1904).
• January 26 – Dolly Rudeman, Dutch graphic designer (b. 1902).
• February 4 – Stojan Aralica, famous Serbian Impressionist painter and academic (b. 1883).
• February 6 – Albert Kotin, Russian-born American Abstract Expressionist artist (b. 1907).
• February 17 – Graham Sutherland, English artist (b. 1903).
• February 22 – Oskar Kokoschka, Austrian artist, poet and playwright (b. 1886).
• March 5 – John Skeaping, English sculptor and equine painter (b. 1901).
• March 18 – Tamara de Lempicka, Polish Art Deco painter (b. 1898).
• April 21
  • Ľudovít Fulla, Slovak painter, graphic artist, illustrator, stage designer and art teacher (b. 1902).
  • Sohrab Sepehri, Persian poet and a painter (b. 1928).
• May 15 – Len Lye, New Zealand-born American kinetic sculptor and filmmaker (b. 1901).
• May 16 – Izis Bidermanas, Lithuanian-born photographer (b. 1911).
• June 7 – Philip Guston, Canadian-born American Abstract Expressionist painter and printmaker (b. 1913).
• June 23 – Clyfford Still, American Abstract Expressionist painter (b. 1904).

July to December edit

• July 16 – Robert Brackman, Ukrainian-born American painter and art teacher (b. 1898)^[4]
• August 26 – Tex Avery, American animator, cartoonist, and director (b. 1908).
• September 14 – Maxwell Bates, Canadian architect and expressionist painter (b. 1906).
• November 22 – Norah McGuinness, Irish painter and illustrator (b. 1901).
• December 26 – Tony Smith, American sculptor, visual artist and theorist on art (b. 1912).
• December 30 – Patrick Hennessy, Irish painter (b. 1915).

Undated edit

• Cicely Hey, English-born artist and model (born 1896)

• 1980 in fine arts of the Soviet Union