Cubism Trivia
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46 free Cubism trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Cubism trivia quiz covers the movement that broke pictures into facets and reassembled them from many viewpoints at once. It begins with the influences, Cézanne's cylinders, spheres and cones and the 1907 retrospective, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and the brothel it was named after, and the critic who first sneered at Braque's little cubes. Then it follows Picasso and Braque through their roped-together partnership, the dealer Kahnweiler who kept them out of the Salons, the Analytic and Synthetic phases and the oilcloth collage that started modern collage. The other half is the wider movement: Salle 41 at the 1911 Indépendants, the scandal at the Grand Palais, Gleizes and Metzinger's book, Duchamp's censored nude, the Section d'Or, Apollinaire's Orphism, Léger's tubes, Juan Gris, the Armory Show, Cubist sculpture, Le Corbusier's Purism and the only Cubist buildings ever built, in Prague. There are questions on Guernica and Braque's war wound too. Difficulty runs from easy to expert and is shown on every question. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question carries its citation. Try our Picasso and famous paintings quizzes next.
30 of 46 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which bohemian quarter of Paris were Picasso and Braque both living when they invented Cubism?
Montmartre
Montmartre. The two lived close enough to compare canvases constantly, and for a time their pictures grew so alike that even experts struggle to tell one man's from the other's.
Q 02Which design style took its sharp, faceted geometry from Cubism?
Art Deco
Art Deco. Designers of the 1920s folded the Cubists' angles and fragments into furniture, fashion and buildings, so an avant-garde experiment ended up as the look of luxury.
Q 03Whose late works, especially their handling of three-dimensional form, chiefly influenced Cubism?
Paul Cézanne
Paul Cézanne's late landscapes and bathers, shown in a Salon d'Automne retrospective the year after his death, taught the young Cubists to build form from shifting planes.
Q 04Picasso was questioned by police in 1911 over the theft of which painting from a Paris museum?
Mona Lisa
Mona Lisa. Picasso and a poet friend were both cleared, and the real thief, an Italian handyman who had once worked at the museum, was caught two years later trying to sell the picture in Florence.
Q 05Two faces in Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon are widely traced to which art?
African masks
African masks. Picasso saw them at a Paris ethnographic museum midway through his work on the picture, yet later denied the debt and pointed to ancient Iberian sculpture instead.
Q 06The "Avignon" of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon refers to a street in which city?
Barcelona
Barcelona. Picasso spent his teens in the city, and the title points to one of its streets, Carrer d'Avinyó, and not to the French town of Avignon at all.
Q 07Les Demoiselles d'Avignon shows women in what setting?
A brothel
A brothel. Picasso simply called the picture 'my brothel'; a friend gave it the politer title for its first public showing, and the painter never liked it.
Q 08Where does Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon hang today?
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. When Picasso first showed the canvas to his closest friends in 1907 they were appalled, and he did not exhibit it in public until 1916.
Q 09Which critic wrote in 1908 that Braque reduced everything "to cubes", helping name the movement?
Louis Vauxcelles
Louis Vauxcelles meant it as a sneer, as he had three years earlier when he called another group of painters 'fauves', or wild beasts. Both insults stuck as the movements' names.
Q 10Which artist reportedly described Braque's 1908 paintings to a critic as made of 'little cubes'?
Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse reportedly dismissed the landscapes Braque sent to the 1908 Salon d'Automne as 'little cubes', and that autumn a critic's review put 'cubes' in print, the seed of the movement's name.
Q 11Braque's 1908 Cubist landscapes were painted at which village near Marseille?
L'Estaque
L'Estaque, a fishing village on the Bay of Marseille, gave Braque the simplified houses and viaduct of his 1908 landscapes, the works a critic mocked as cubes.
Q 12Which writer called Picasso's 1909 Horta de Ebro landscapes the first Cubist paintings?
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein, in her memoir, tells of hanging the landscapes in her Paris home and answering visitors who found them too strange by producing Picasso's own photographs of the village.
Q 13What is the usual name for the austere, near-monochrome first phase of Picasso and Braque's Cubism?
Analytic Cubism
Q 21Which Duchamp painting was censored from the 1912 Salon des Indépendants by his own brothers?
Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2
Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 upset the Cubists who ran the exhibition, and they sent his two brothers to ask him to alter it. He withdrew the picture instead, and within a year it had made his name in America.
Q 22Which 1913 New York exhibition introduced astonished Americans to the European avant-garde?
The Armory Show
The Armory Show took its name from the National Guard drill hall in Manhattan that housed it. Its newest paintings from Paris were mocked in the press as a hoax, which only made them famous.
Q 23Braque said that inventing Cubism alongside Picasso had been like being what?
Analytic Cubism is so called because the painters seemed to analyse each object, taking it apart into small facets. Colour was cut back to browns and greys so that nothing distracted from the structure.
Q 14Which phase of Cubism, from about 1912 to 1914, featured simpler shapes, brighter colours and newspaper print?
Synthetic Cubism
Synthetic Cubism takes its name from synthesis: the painters now built a picture up from flat coloured shapes and pasted scraps, where before they had taken objects apart into facets.
Q 15Which art dealer guaranteed Braque and Picasso an annual income for exclusive rights to their work?
Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler
Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler bought whatever his painters produced and sold it only to a small circle of collectors, which let them experiment in private without a thought for the critics.
Q 16Whose cylinder-filled version of Cubism did critics nickname 'Tubism'?
Fernand Léger
Fernand Léger built his early figures out of cylinders and cones, hence the jibe. After serving in the First World War he made the machine his great subject.
Q 17Which Paris landmark did Robert Delaunay depict in a famous Cubist series shown in 1911?
The Eiffel Tower
The Eiffel Tower obsessed Robert Delaunay, who painted it again and again as a tilting red structure breaking apart among the rooftops. One version hung at the 1911 Salon des Indépendants.
Q 18Which 1912 work by Picasso is credited as the first Cubist collage?
Still Life with Chair Caning
Still Life with Chair Caning pastes a piece of oilcloth printed with a chair-caning pattern onto an oval canvas framed with rope, the first Cubist collage.
Q 19Braque's first papier collé, made in 1912, used shop-bought paper printed to imitate what?
Wood grain
Wood grain. Braque spotted the printed wallpaper in a shop in Avignon, but he waited until Picasso had left for Paris before buying a roll, so that he could try the idea out alone.
Q 20Cubist works at the 1912 Salon d'Automne caused a political scandal by being shown in which government building?
The Grand Palais
The Grand Palais, a state-owned hall, hosted the 1912 Salon d'Automne; councillor Jean Pierre Philippe Lampué's protest at public money housing Cubists reached the Chamber of Deputies.
Roped together on a mountain
Roped together on a mountain. He added that what the two of them said in those years would never be said again; the partnership ended when Braque went off to war in 1914.
Q 24Which two painters wrote Du "Cubisme", the first major treatise on the movement, in 1912?
Metzinger and Gleizes
Metzinger and Gleizes argued that a painter should be free to move round the subject and fuse several views into a single image, which is why Cubist pictures show an object from many sides at once.
Q 25Which poet wrote Les Peintres Cubistes (1913)?
Guillaume Apollinaire
Guillaume Apollinaire was the Cubists' friend and their most passionate defender in print. He had a knack for labels too: in 1917 he coined the word 'surrealist'.
Q 26By what other name is the Cubist collective the Section d'Or known?
The Puteaux Group
The Puteaux Group met on Sunday afternoons at the home of the three Duchamp brothers in the suburb of Puteaux. Its other name means 'golden section', a sign of the members' faith in mathematical proportion.
Q 27Which Section d'Or exhibitor later became a leading figure of New York Dada?
Francis Picabia
Francis Picabia showed with the Section d'Or in 1912, then from 1913 in New York worked with Alfred Stieglitz's 291 circle and later edited the Dada review 391.
Q 28Which instrument did Picasso fold and glue together from cardboard, paper and string in 1912, carrying Cubism into sculpture?
A guitar
A guitar. Sculptors had always carved or modelled a solid mass; Picasso's flimsy construction is often called the first sculpture to be assembled from separate parts, with empty space doing half the work.
Q 29Which colourful abstract offshoot of Cubism was pioneered by Kupka and the Delaunays?
Orphism
Orphism, a term a poet-critic coined after the mythical singer Orpheus, brought colour back during Cubism's monochrome phase and led Kupka and the Delaunays towards pure abstraction.
Q 30Which Spanish Cubist, born José Victoriano González-Pérez in Madrid, took his adopted name in 1905?
Juan Gris
Juan Gris left Madrid for Paris the following year and settled in the same studio building as Picasso, the hero he honoured in 1912 with a Cubist portrait.