Art Deco Trivia
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48 free Art Deco trivia questions with answers — pop culture quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Art Deco trivia for architecture lovers, design students, Gatsby fans and anyone who has stood under the Chrysler Building's spire or strolled Ocean Drive in Miami Beach. This quiz starts with where the style came from: Auguste Perret's concrete theatre, the Vienna Secession, Cubism, Fauvism and the Ballets Russes, the Tutankhamun craze, and the 1925 Paris exposition that gave the movement its name decades later, courtesy of historian Bevis Hillier. It then covers the buildings and cities: New York's Chrysler and Empire State buildings and Rockefeller Center, Miami Beach's 960 pastel hotels, Napier rebuilt after the 1931 earthquake, Mumbai's UNESCO-listed Marine Drive, London's Hoover Building and Eltham Palace, and Christ the Redeemer above Rio. The designers get their due too: Ruhlmann's furniture, Lalique's glass, Cassandre's Normandie poster, Erte's covers, Lempicka's Bugatti self-portrait, Cartier's jewels and Bakelite radios, ending with the sleek Streamline Moderne of the 1930s. Questions range from easy to expert, and every answer was checked against a reference page and carries its source. If you enjoy this quiz, try our architecture, 1920s and skyscrapers quizzes next.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01During the 1925 Paris exposition, which landmark did carmaker Citroën turn into a giant illuminated advertisement for itself?
Eiffel Tower
Eiffel Tower. André Citroën spelled out his name down three of its sides in coloured bulbs for the fair that later gave Art Deco its name, and the sign stayed lit into the 1930s.
Q 02Which American-born dancer became a Paris sensation in 1925 and a favourite subject of Art Deco posters and figurines?
Josephine Baker
Josephine Baker. She had sailed from New York at 19, and her stage costume of little more than a skirt of artificial bananas became a lasting emblem of the Jazz Age.
Q 03Which suspension bridge, opened in 1937, has Art Deco towers and streetlamps styled by architect Irving Morrow?
Golden Gate Bridge
Golden Gate Bridge. Morrow also chose its orange-red paint, because the colour suits the surrounding hills and stays visible to ships in San Francisco's fog.
Q 04Art Deco's bold geometry has its origins in Cubism and which movement co-founded by painter Gustav Klimt?
The Vienna Secession
The Vienna Secession. Klimt and his allies walked out of Vienna's conservative artists' association in 1897, hence the name, and their taste for straight lines and squares fed directly into Art Deco.
Q 05Which dance company's colourful sets by Leon Bakst helped inspire Art Deco's palette?
The Ballets Russes
The Ballets Russes. Sergei Diaghilev's troupe caused a sensation in Paris from 1909, and Bakst's opulent sets and costumes started a craze that spread to fashion and interior design.
Q 06The discovery of which pharaoh's tomb fed the ancient-Egyptian motifs of 1920s Art Deco?
Tutankhamun
Tutankhamun. After the tomb was opened in 1922, lotus flowers, scarabs and pyramids began appearing on everything from evening jackets to cinema fronts.
Q 07Which 1913 venue by Auguste Perret is regarded as the first Art Deco landmark in Paris?
The Theatre des Champs-Elysees
The Theatre des Champs-Elysees. Less than two months after opening it staged the premiere of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, a night remembered for the uproar in the audience.
Q 08Which country did France leave off the guest list for the 1925 Paris exposition because of the First World War?
Germany
Germany. It was shut out over lingering wartime bitterness, even though Austria, its ally in that war, was invited and took part.
Q 09Which architect's stark white pavilion at the 1925 Paris exposition, stripped of all ornament, foreshadowed modernism?
Le Corbusier
Le Corbusier. Inside the bare white box he displayed his Plan Voisin, a proposal to demolish a swathe of central Paris and rebuild it as rows of identical towers.
Q 10Which furniture designer starred at the 1925 Paris exposition with a pavilion styled as a wealthy collector's house?
Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann
Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann. He refused mass production and veneered his pieces in the rarest woods, which made them so costly that modernist critics attacked them as furniture only the rich could own.
Q 11Which city's historic district is billed as the world's largest concentration of Art Deco architecture?
Miami Beach
Miami Beach. Barbara Capitman's campaigners won the district a place on the National Register in 1979, yet its Senator Hotel was still razed for a car park in 1988 despite their candlelight vigils.
Q 12Which fashion designer was shot dead in 1997 outside his mansion on Ocean Drive, in the heart of an Art Deco district?
Gianni Versace
Gianni Versace. He was shot on his own front steps as he came home from a morning walk, the victim of serial killer Andrew Cunanan.
Q 13Which New Zealand city was rebuilt in Art Deco style after a 1931 earthquake levelled it?
Napier
Q 21Which mythological figure is Paul Manship's gilded statue overlooking the Rockefeller Center ice rink?
Prometheus
Prometheus. Manship shows the Titan tumbling through a ring of zodiac signs with the fire he stole for mankind; the centre's other famous statue, Atlas, is by Lee Lawrie.
Q 22Which statue, completed in 1931 and sculpted by France's Paul Landowski, ranks as the world's largest Art Deco sculpture?
Christ the Redeemer
Christ the Redeemer. The open arms are credited to Brazilian artist Carlos Oswald: the design that won the commission had shown Christ holding a cross in one hand and a globe in the other.
Q 23Which later strand of Art Deco swept American design in the 1930s?
Streamline Moderne
Napier. New Zealand's deadliest earthquake killed at least 256 people, and fires gutted the centre when the water supply failed, so the town was rebuilt all at once in the style of the day.
Q 14Which Indian city's Victorian and Art Deco ensemble was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2018?
Mumbai
Mumbai. Its Art Deco flats and cinemas went up on land reclaimed from the bay, directly facing the Victorian Gothic public buildings across the open ground of the Oval Maidan.
Q 15Who designed the Chrysler Building?
William Van Alen
William Van Alen. Walter Chrysler refused to pay his fee, so he sued and won, but the lawsuit wrecked his reputation with clients and he ended his career teaching sculpture.
Q 16The winged steel sculptures on the Chrysler Building's 31st-floor corners are giant replicas of which part of a 1929 Chrysler car?
Radiator caps
Radiator caps. Walter Chrysler wanted the tower to advertise his cars, so the same floor also carries a brick frieze of hubcaps and mudguards.
Q 17The Chrysler Building's gleaming crown is clad in which metal, made to a formula patented by Krupp of Essen?
Stainless steel
Stainless steel. Krupp's engineers had patented the rust-resisting alloy only in 1912, and the tower used it for crown, window frames and decoration alike, making it an early American showcase for the metal.
Q 18The Chrysler Building's brief reign as the world's tallest building was ended in 1931 by which New York skyscraper?
Empire State Building
Empire State Building. Its mast was planned as a mooring station for airships, with passengers boarding from the 102nd floor, but the winds up there made docking impossible.
Q 19Which New York theatre, opened in 1932, has Art Deco interiors by competition winner Donald Deskey?
Radio City Music Hall
Radio City Music Hall. Deskey later moved from showpiece interiors to supermarket shelves, designing the Crest toothpaste pack.
Q 20Diego Rivera's Rockefeller Center mural was destroyed for including a portrait of whom?
Lenin
Lenin. Nelson Rockefeller asked Rivera to paint the face out; he refused, the unfinished fresco was destroyed, and Rivera repainted the whole scene in Mexico from photographs.
Streamline Moderne. It borrowed the wind-cheating curves of fast machines and wrapped them around things that never moved, from petrol pumps and fridges to cigarette lighters.
Q 24Which 1934 American car, shaped by wind-tunnel tests, pioneered the aerodynamic look yet flopped with buyers?
Chrysler Airflow
Chrysler Airflow. Buyers balked at its rounded, unfamiliar looks, and the car meant to change motoring was a commercial failure that came close to disaster for its maker.
Q 25Which Cunard liner of 1936, decorated in Art Deco style, is now a floating hotel moored at Long Beach, California?
Queen Mary
Queen Mary. As a wartime troopship she once carried more than 16,000 people on a single crossing, and in 1967, too big for the Panama Canal, she rounded Cape Horn to reach her retirement berth.
Q 26Cassandre's celebrated 1935 poster depicted which French liner head-on?
Normandie
Normandie. Seven years after the poster, the ship itself burned and capsized at a New York pier while being refitted as a troopship.
Q 27Which early plastic, invented in 1907, was moulded into countless Art Deco radios, telephones and costume jewellery?
Bakelite
Bakelite. Leo Baekeland's resin was the first plastic made wholly from synthetic ingredients, and because it set hard, resisted heat and did not conduct electricity, it became the casing of the radio age.
Q 28Tamara de Lempicka's famous 1929 self-portrait shows her at the wheel of which car?
A Bugatti
A Bugatti. The German fashion magazine Die Dame commissioned the self-portrait for a cover celebrating independent women, though Lempicka is said to have owned only a small yellow Renault.
Q 29The Russian-born designer Erte took his pseudonym from what?
The French pronunciation of his initials
The French pronunciation of his initials: R and T, for Romain de Tirtoff. He took the pen name to spare his family, because his admiral father had wanted him to become a naval officer.
Q 30Rene Lalique, the glassmaker famed for vases and perfume bottles, also famously made what for cars?
Hood ornaments
Hood ornaments. Lalique was already a celebrated jeweller when he turned to glass, and by the late 1920s his moulded mascots, such as the wind-blown head Spirit of the Wind, were riding on smart cars.