50 Fun Facts About Modern Art

Which artist painted the vast anti-war canvas Guernica after bombers destroyed a Basque market town in 1937?

Pablo Picasso made it for the Spanish pavilion at the 1937 Paris world's fair. The canvas then spent decades at New York's Museum of Modern Art and reached Spain only in 1981.

What bathroom fixture is Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, signed with a false name and sent to a New York art show in 1917?

A urinal turned on its back, it was kept out of the show area and lost soon afterwards. The versions in museums are replicas Duchamp approved in the 1950s and 1960s.

Which Spanish painter filled The Persistence of Memory with limp pocket watches draped over a branch and a ledge?

Salvador Dalí said the soft watches came from seeing a Camembert cheese melt in the sun, not from the theory of relativity. The painting first sold for $250.

Which American artist filled a Los Angeles gallery in 1962 with 32 paintings of Campbell's soup cans?

Andy Warhol said he had eaten the same soup lunch every day for twenty years. Each canvas shows a different variety, and the full set was later bought by New York's Museum of Modern Art.

Which street artist's Girl with Balloon slid into a shredder hidden in its frame moments after selling at Sotheby's?

Banksy meant the whole canvas to be destroyed, but the shredder stopped about halfway. The half-cut picture was retitled Love Is in the Bin and resold in 2021 for almost 18 times the price.

Which fruit did Maurizio Cattelan duct-tape to a wall at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019, selling the work for $120,000?

A banana and a strip of tape are only part of the work, titled Comedian: buyers really get a certificate with instructions for displaying it. One later owner ate his on stage.

Which painter based The Starry Night on the view from his room in an asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in 1889?

Vincent van Gogh called the picture a failure in a letter to the painter Émile Bernard. The village under the swirling sky was invented, since none could be seen from his window.

Which Norwegian artist made four versions of The Scream, two of which were stolen from Oslo museums and later recovered?

Edvard Munch traced the image to a sunset walk when the clouds turned blood red. One theory puts that lurid sky down to dust from the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa.

Which art movement was named by critic Louis Leroy, mocking the title of Claude Monet's hazy view of Le Havre harbour?

Impressionism was meant as a put-down in an 1874 review for the satirical paper Le Charivari. The label was taken up at once by friends and enemies of the new painting alike.

Which Mexican painter turned to art while recovering from a bus crash at 18 and later married the muralist Diego Rivera?

Frida Kahlo had been heading for medical school before the crash left her in lifelong pain. The Louvre later bought one of her paintings, its first by a Mexican artist.

Which technique did Georges Seurat pioneer in A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, finished in 1886?

Pointillism was not the painter's own word for it: he preferred Divisionism. He spent some two years on the canvas, trusting the viewer's eye to blend its specks of colour.

Which movement was named from a critic's jibes at Georges Braque's L'Estaque landscapes of 1908?

Cubism got its label from a reviewer's talk of cubes and cubic oddities in Braque's shows. The pictures broke hillside houses into simple blocks and took perspective apart.

Which American painter laid canvases on the floor of a Long Island barn and dripped household paint onto them?

Jackson Pollock made his most famous paintings in a short burst between 1947 and 1950, and Time magazine nicknamed him Jack the Dripper. He died in a car crash at 44.

Which famous painting did Marcel Duchamp deface in 1919, pencilling a moustache and beard onto a cheap postcard copy?

Mona Lisa got her moustache a second time when Francis Picabia, too impatient to wait for the original, drew his own version for a magazine and forgot the goatee.

What kind of London building, shut down in 1981, reopened in 2000 as the art gallery Tate Modern?

A power station by Giles Gilbert Scott, the architect of Battersea's, became the gallery. Its Turbine Hall, running the whole length of the building, is used for huge commissioned works.

Which movement did the poet André Breton launch with a 1924 manifesto in Paris, drawing on dreams and the unconscious?

Surrealism took its name from a word the poet Guillaume Apollinaire coined in 1917. Breton had to win the term from a rival group that issued its own manifesto two weeks before his.

Which American painter of giant close-up flowers settled in New Mexico to paint desert hills and animal skulls?

Georgia O'Keeffe lived in New Mexico for some forty years after the death of her husband, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz. He had first exhibited her work in 1916.

Which Dutch painter of black grids and primary-colour blocks dropped a letter from his surname after moving to Paris?

Piet Mondrian reached New York in 1940 and painted Broadway Boogie Woogie after the Manhattan street grid and the piano blues he loved. He was born Mondriaan.

Which Austrian painter covered The Kiss in gold leaf during his so-called Golden Period in Vienna?

Gustav Klimt had not even finished the picture when the Austrian government bought it at its first public showing in 1908. He worked silver and platinum into it too.

Which Edward Hopper painting of 1942 shows four people in a brightly lit downtown diner?

Nighthawks was sold within months to the Art Institute of Chicago for $3,000. Hopper posed in a mirror for two of the men, and his wife Jo modelled for the woman.

Which movement got its name in 1905, when a critic likened André Derain and fellow painters to wild beasts?

Fauvism comes from fauves, the French for wild beasts. The critic was contrasting the blazing canvases with a calm Renaissance-style statue in the same room.

Which anti-art movement was born in 1916 at Zürich's Cabaret Voltaire among émigrés escaping the First World War?

Dada has no agreed origin as a name. One widely told story has a paper knife jabbed into a dictionary and landing on the French word for a hobby horse.

Which French artist, too ill to paint in old age, cut shapes from coloured paper for works such as The Snail?

Henri Matisse cut the shapes with scissors from sheets his assistants had painted with gouache, a method he took up after surgery left him bedridden for three months.

Which Belgian painter, once a wallpaper designer, painted a pipe above a caption denying that it is a pipe?

René Magritte, asked about the picture, said that of course it was not a pipe: just try filling it with tobacco. He called the work The Treachery of Images.

Which movement, pioneered in Britain by Richard Hamilton, took its imagery from adverts, comics and product packaging?

Pop art had its roots in the Independent Group, founded in London in 1952. Its members were fascinated by American consumer goods and the media culture that followed the war.

Which American painter copied comic-book panels by hand onto huge canvases, complete with the printer's Ben-Day dots?

Roy Lichtenstein pushed paint through a handmade metal screen to imitate a cheap mechanical printing process. He later gave the same treatment to famous canvases by Monet.

In which German city did architect Walter Gropius found the Bauhaus school in 1919, six years before its move to Dessau?

Weimar hosted the school until 1925. It shut for good in 1933 under pressure from the Nazi regime, which had painted it as a centre of communist thinking.

What title did the Nazi Party give its 1937 Munich exhibition mocking modern works seized from German museums?

Degenerate Art drew a million visitors in its first six weeks. The 650 works were hung badly on purpose, beside graffiti and labels jeering at the artists.

Which Russian-born pioneer of abstract painting quit a career teaching law at 30 to study art in Munich?

Wassily Kandinsky went on to teach at the Bauhaus from 1922 until it closed. One story has him glimpsing what abstraction could do when he failed to recognise his own canvas hung upside down.

Which Russian painter hung his Black Square high across a corner in 1915, the place where homes kept religious icons?

Kazimir Malevich called the picture the zero point of painting. X-rays in 2015 revealed two earlier compositions hidden beneath the black paint.

Which Italian movement, launched by the poet Filippo Marinetti in 1909, glorified speed, cars and the industrial city?

Futurism's founding manifesto vowed to destroy museums and libraries and glorified war. It reached readers across Europe when the French daily Le Figaro reprinted it.

Which painter scandalised Paris in 1863 with Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, a nude woman picnicking beside two clothed men?

Édouard Manet had the picture turned down by the official Salon jury, so he hung it in a rival show of rejected works. His model, Victorine Meurent, also posed for his Olympia.

Which French painter, a former stockbroker, sailed for Tahiti in 1891 after a last visit to his wife and children?

Paul Gauguin had already tried Panama, where he ran out of money and worked as a labourer on the canal. He spent his last years in Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands.

Which painter made about eighty views of Mont Sainte-Victoire, the mountain overlooking his native Aix-en-Provence?

Paul Cézanne probably took up the subject after seeing the mountain from a moving train on a newly opened railway line. He praised the view in a letter to his friend, the novelist Émile Zola.

Which American sculptor made the moving abstract works of 1931 that Marcel Duchamp christened mobiles?

Alexander Calder studied mechanical engineering because his parents did not want him to be an artist. In 1920s Paris he performed a miniature circus built from wire, cloth and cork.

Which painter of rectangular colour forms returned his fee for murals meant for New York's Four Seasons restaurant?

Mark Rothko grew disgusted at the idea of his pictures decorating a room for wealthy diners. He gave the canvases to museums instead, among them the Tate in London.

Which Berlin building did Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrap in silvery fabric and blue rope for two weeks in 1995?

The Reichstag was wrapped only after 24 years of refusals. Germany's parliament finally put the idea to a vote and backed it by 292 to 223.

Which Japanese artist, famed for polka dots and pumpkins, moved by choice into a Tokyo psychiatric hospital in 1977?

Yayoi Kusama traced her dots to hallucinations that began when she was ten. She kept a studio a short distance from the hospital and went on working there.

Which poem inspired Auguste Rodin's The Gates of Hell, the bronze doorway on which The Thinker first appeared?

The Divine Comedy supplied the scene, drawn from its first part, the Inferno. The seated figure above the doors was at first called The Poet, and Rodin kept reworking the gates for 37 years.

Whose portrait in Diego Rivera's mural for Rockefeller Center led the building's owners to have the work destroyed?

Vladimir Lenin was added after a newspaper attacked the mural as anti-capitalist propaganda, and Rivera refused to paint him out. He later repainted the whole scene in Mexico from photographs.

Which artist first won notice in the late 1970s as half of SAMO, a graffiti duo writing epigrams across Manhattan?

Jean-Michel Basquiat began SAMO as a private joke with a schoolmate, Al Diaz. He died at 27, and in 2017 one of his skull paintings sold for $110.5 million.

Which Spanish city's run-down port area became home in 1997 to a Guggenheim Museum by Frank Gehry clad in titanium?

Bilbao got its museum because the Basque government offered to pay for the building, hoping to revive a port that had once been the local economy's mainstay.

Which Romanian sculptor went to court after US customs taxed his polished bronze Bird in Space as a metal object?

Constantin Brâncuși stayed in Paris during the trial, disliking the attention. Customs officials had refused to believe the bronze was art and released it on bond under Kitchen Utensils and Hospital Supplies.

Which Dutch movement, founded in Leiden in 1917, limited painters to straight lines, rectangles and primary colours?

De Stijl was also the title of the journal that spread the group's ideas. Its rules reached furniture and buildings too, as in Gerrit Rietveld's Red and Blue Chair and his Schröder House in Utrecht.

Which group of painters formed in Munich in 1911 around Franz Marc and broke up when the First World War began?

Der Blaue Reiter means The Blue Rider, a name one founder later put down to a shared love of blue, of horses and of riders. The group also published an almanac under the same title.

Which 1913 New York exhibition caused uproar with Marcel Duchamp's painting Nude Descending a Staircase?

The Armory Show took its name from the 69th Regiment's drill hall on Lexington Avenue, rented for $5,000. It was the first large exhibition of modern art in America.

Which building material made up Carl Andre's Equivalent VIII, bought by the Tate and mocked in the press in 1976?

Bricks, 120 of them in two layers, make up the piece. Andre had sent the originals back for a refund when the work failed to sell, so new ones were bought and shipped to London with instructions.

Which animal did German artist Joseph Beuys share a New York gallery enclosure with for three days in 1974?

A coyote named Little John shared the space for eight hours a day. Beuys had been blindfolded at the airport, wrapped in felt and driven to the gallery in an ambulance.

Which Swedish painter of early abstract works ordered them kept secret for twenty years after her death in 1944?

Hilma af Klint felt the world was not ready to see them. She belonged to The Five, a circle of women who held séances, and her pictures rank among the first major abstract works in Western art.

Which 1907 painting of five women in a Barcelona brothel gives two of them faces resembling African masks?

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon went unseen by the public until 1916, when the poet André Salmon gave it that tamer title. Its painter had called it The Brothel of Avignon.