Modern Art
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50 free Modern Art trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Modern art begins with a refusal. In the 1860s a handful of painters in Paris stopped trying to please the official juries, and for the next hundred years each new generation tore up the rules of the one before. The results still divide a room: canvases with no subject at all, sculptures bought from a shop, pictures that sell for fortunes and pictures built to destroy themselves. This quiz follows that story from the first scandals to the contemporary scene. Expect questions on the big movements and how they got their names, the painters and sculptors behind the most famous works, the museums that house them, and the stunts, lawsuits and auction-room surprises that made headlines. It is written for gallery-goers, art history students and anyone getting ready for a quiz night. The opening questions are ones most people can reach; later ones reward players who know their manifestos and their art schools.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which artist painted the vast anti-war canvas Guernica after bombers destroyed a Basque market town in 1937?
Pablo Picasso
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.
Q 02What bathroom fixture is Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, signed with a false name and sent to a New York art show in 1917?
A urinal
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.
Q 03Which Spanish painter filled The Persistence of Memory with limp pocket watches draped over a branch and a ledge?
Salvador Dalí
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.
Q 04Which American artist filled a Los Angeles gallery in 1962 with 32 paintings of Campbell's soup cans?
Andy Warhol
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.
Q 05Which street artist's Girl with Balloon slid into a shredder hidden in its frame moments after selling at Sotheby's?
Banksy
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.
Q 06Which fruit did Maurizio Cattelan duct-tape to a wall at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019, selling the work for $120,000?
A banana
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.
Q 07Which painter based The Starry Night on the view from his room in an asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in 1889?
Vincent van Gogh
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.
Q 08Which Norwegian artist made four versions of The Scream, two of which were stolen from Oslo museums and later recovered?
Edvard Munch
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.
Q 09Which art movement was named by critic Louis Leroy, mocking the title of Claude Monet's hazy view of Le Havre harbour?
Impressionism
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.
Q 10Which Mexican painter turned to art while recovering from a bus crash at 18 and later married the muralist Diego Rivera?
Frida Kahlo
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.
Q 11Which technique did Georges Seurat pioneer in A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, finished in 1886?
Pointillism
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.
Q 12Which movement was named from a critic's jibes at Georges Braque's L'Estaque landscapes of 1908?
Cubism
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.
Q 13Which American painter laid canvases on the floor of a Long Island barn and dripped household paint onto them?
Jackson Pollock
Q 21Which movement got its name in 1905, when a critic likened André Derain and fellow painters to wild beasts?
Fauvism
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.
Q 22Which anti-art movement was born in 1916 at Zürich's Cabaret Voltaire among émigrés escaping the First World War?
Dada
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.
Q 23Which French artist, too ill to paint in old age, cut shapes from coloured paper for works such as The Snail?
Henri Matisse
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.
Q 14Which famous painting did Marcel Duchamp deface in 1919, pencilling a moustache and beard onto a cheap postcard copy?
Mona Lisa
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.
Q 15What kind of London building, shut down in 1981, reopened in 2000 as the art gallery Tate Modern?
A power station
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.
Q 16Which movement did the poet André Breton launch with a 1924 manifesto in Paris, drawing on dreams and the unconscious?
Surrealism
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.
Q 17Which American painter of giant close-up flowers settled in New Mexico to paint desert hills and animal skulls?
Georgia O'Keeffe
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.
Q 18Which Dutch painter of black grids and primary-colour blocks dropped a letter from his surname after moving to Paris?
Piet Mondrian
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.
Q 19Which Austrian painter covered The Kiss in gold leaf during his so-called Golden Period in Vienna?
Gustav Klimt
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.
Q 20Which Edward Hopper painting of 1942 shows four people in a brightly lit downtown diner?
Nighthawks
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.
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.
Q 24Which Belgian painter, once a wallpaper designer, painted a pipe above a caption denying that it is a pipe?
René Magritte
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.
Q 25Which movement, pioneered in Britain by Richard Hamilton, took its imagery from adverts, comics and product packaging?
Pop art
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.
Q 26Which American painter copied comic-book panels by hand onto huge canvases, complete with the printer's Ben-Day dots?
Roy Lichtenstein
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.
Q 27In which German city did architect Walter Gropius found the Bauhaus school in 1919, six years before its move to Dessau?
Weimar
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.
Q 28What title did the Nazi Party give its 1937 Munich exhibition mocking modern works seized from German museums?
Degenerate Art
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.
Q 29Which Russian-born pioneer of abstract painting quit a career teaching law at 30 to study art in Munich?
Wassily Kandinsky
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.
Q 30Which Russian painter hung his Black Square high across a corner in 1915, the place where homes kept religious icons?
Kazimir Malevich
Kazimir Malevich called the picture the zero point of painting. X-rays in 2015 revealed two earlier compositions hidden beneath the black paint.