Pablo Picasso Trivia
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49 free Pablo Picasso trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This Pablo Picasso trivia quiz covers a 76-year career and the tangled life around it. It begins in Málaga with a father who painted pigeons and a toddler whose first word was a shortening of the Spanish for pencil, then follows him through A Coruña, Barcelona, the Madrid academy he stopped attending, the first freezing winter in Paris when he burned his work to keep warm, and the suicide that darkened the Blue Period. From there the questions move through the Rose Period harlequins, Gertrude Stein, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and the Trocadéro, Cubism with Braque, the collage that started Synthetic Cubism, the Mona Lisa arrest, the Ballets Russes and Olga Khokhlova, Marie-Thérèse Walter, Dora Maar and Guernica, the Gestapo officer who asked 'Did you do that?', the French Communist Party and the dove, Françoise Gilot, Jacqueline Roque, the Chicago sculpture named after an Afghan hound, the record-breaking auctions and the estate fight after he died without a will. 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 Salvador Dalí and Renaissance Art quizzes next.
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Q 01In which Spanish city was Picasso born in 1881?
Málaga
Málaga. He lived in the Andalusian port until 1891, when his father took a teaching job in A Coruña and moved the family to Spain's far north-west.
Q 02A family story says Picasso's first words were 'piz, piz', short for the Spanish word for what?
Pencil
Pencil. 'Piz' was a toddler's attempt at lápiz, in a story the family liked to tell, and his father, a drawing teacher, became his first teacher.
Q 03Pablo Ruiz signed his paintings 'Picasso', a surname he got from whom?
His mother
His mother. Spanish custom gave him both parents' surnames, Ruiz and Picasso; he came to prefer hers, and by late 1901 he had dropped Ruiz from his signature.
Q 04Legend says Picasso's father, an art teacher, did what after seeing his teenage son's skill?
Gave up painting
Gave up painting. In the usual telling he handed the boy his own brushes and palette, but it is only a legend; he went on teaching drawing in Barcelona for years.
Q 05Picasso's daughter Paloma made her name designing jewellery for which company?
Tiffany & Co.
Tiffany & Co. When her father died in 1973 she put her design career on hold to help catalogue the work he left, and only in 1980 did the jeweller bring out her first collection.
Q 06Which old master, known for elongated limbs and mystical faces, did the young Picasso admire in Madrid?
El Greco
El Greco. Bored by classes at Madrid's Royal Academy of San Fernando, the 16-year-old studied the museums instead, and those stretched figures resurface in his Blue Period.
Q 07How did Picasso and the poet Max Jacob share a one-bed Paris room when both were broke?
Slept in shifts
Slept in shifts. Jacob took the bed at night and Picasso by day, after working until dawn, and they were so poor that some of his work was burned for warmth.
Q 08Steve Wynn had just agreed to sell Picasso's Le Rêve for $139 million when he did what?
Put his elbow through it
Put his elbow through it. The casino owner, who has poor peripheral vision, tore the canvas while showing it to friends; repaired, it went to the same buyer in 2013 for $155 million.
Q 09Whose suicide helped set the sombre tone of Picasso's Blue Period?
His friend Carles Casagemas
His friend Carles Casagemas shot himself in a Paris café in 1901 after a failed love affair. Picasso painted him again and again, last as the young man in the allegory La Vie.
Q 10The gaunt musician in Picasso's The Old Guitarist shares which condition with many of his Blue Period figures?
Blindness
Blindness. Picasso drew the period's blind beggars and castaways from the streets of Barcelona, and painted a sightless diner in The Blind Man's Meal of 1903.
Q 11Which figure became Picasso's personal symbol during the Rose Period?
The harlequin
The harlequin. In Family of Saltimbanques, the big 1905 canvas of travelling circus folk, Picasso gave the figure in the chequered costume his own face.
Q 12Which artists' model became Picasso's lover in Montmartre in 1904, as his blue paintings turned to rose?
Fernande Olivier
Fernande Olivier. His happiness with her is one reason often given for the change, though he was so jealous that he hated her leaving the studio without him.
Q 13Which American writer collected Picasso's early work and hosted the Paris salon where he met Matisse?
Gertrude Stein
Q 21Picasso's first wife, Olga Khokhlova, was a ballerina with which company?
Diaghilev's Ballets Russes
Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. He met her in Rome in 1917 while designing the company's ballet Parade, and they married the next year with full Russian Orthodox ceremony in Paris.
Q 22Picasso's son Paulo spent much of his adult life working for his father as what?
Chauffeur
Chauffeur. Paulo drove his father about for a meagre wage paid by the week, a bleak sequel for the little boy Picasso had once sketched tenderly, again and again.
Q 23Picasso and which composer collaborated on the ballet Pulcinella in 1920?
Igor Stravinsky
Gertrude Stein. She claimed to have sat some ninety times for his portrait of her, and when people said it looked nothing like her, Picasso replied, 'She will.'
Q 14Which German-born Paris dealer championed Cubism from the start and sat for a 1910 Picasso portrait?
Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler
Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. He put his painters under exclusive contract, agreeing to buy everything they made, and kept them out of the big public salons.
Q 15By his own account, where did Picasso see the African masks that fed into Les Demoiselles d'Avignon?
The Trocadéro ethnographic museum
The Trocadéro ethnographic museum. He remembered the place as disgusting and wanted to leave, but he stayed, and later called the Demoiselles his first exorcism painting.
Q 16How did Matisse react when Picasso showed him Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in his studio?
He angrily called it a mockery
He angrily called it a mockery. Matisse took the picture as an attempt to ridicule modern painting and vowed to get even, and it stayed out of public view until 1916.
Q 17With which painter did Picasso develop Analytic Cubism?
Georges Braque
Georges Braque. They met almost daily, a partnership later likened to two mountaineers roped together, and their brown-and-grey canvases of that time are hard to tell apart.
Q 18In 1911 Picasso was brought before a Paris magistrate and questioned over the theft of which painting?
The Mona Lisa
The Mona Lisa. Shaking with fear, he told the magistrate he barely knew his friend Apollinaire, the poet jailed over the theft, and both men were later cleared.
Q 19Picasso's 1912 Still Life with Chair Caning, with its printed oilcloth, is often called the first Cubist what?
Collage
Collage. The 'caning' is a factory-printed fake, a scrap of oilcloth patterned like a chair seat, while the rope that frames the oval canvas is real.
Q 20Picasso lettered 'Ma Jolie' into Cubist canvases as a tribute to which lover?
Eva Gouel
Eva Gouel. He wrote 'J'aime Eva' on other canvases too, and he was devastated when she died young during the First World War.
Igor Stravinsky. He balked at first at reworking 18th-century tunes then credited to Pergolesi, but the old manuscripts won him over, and the score opened his neoclassical period.
Q 24Which 17-year-old did Picasso stop outside a Paris store in 1927?
Marie-Thérèse Walter
Marie-Thérèse Walter. He introduced himself with 'I am Picasso', a name that meant nothing to her, and he later set her up in a flat across the street from the home he shared with his wife.
Q 25Which mythical creature did Picasso adopt as an alter ego in the 1930s, above all in his Vollard Suite etchings?
The minotaur
The minotaur. Picasso used the half-man, half-bull as a kind of self-portrait, a figure torn between the human and the bestial, and it prowls his Vollard Suite etchings.
Q 26Guernica depicts the bombing of a Basque town during which war?
The Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil War. The Republic had already hired him to paint a mural for its pavilion at the 1937 Paris World's Fair, and the raid by German bombers flying for Franco handed him his subject.
Q 27Which Surrealist photographer recorded Guernica stage by stage as Picasso painted it?
Dora Maar
Dora Maar. His lover at the time, she also found him the vast studio where he painted it, and her stark black-and-white prints are thought to have nudged him to drop colour.
Q 28At Picasso's wish, where did Guernica hang until democracy returned to Spain?
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Picasso left it there in trust for a future Spanish republic, and it went home in 1981, after Franco's death, to a country that had a king instead.
Q 29In a much-told story, what did Picasso tell a German officer who asked whether he had done Guernica?
'No, you did'
'No, you did', he is said to have snapped, in a story set in his Paris studio during the Occupation, when casting bronze was banned and he had his sculptures cast all the same.
Q 30In 1935 Picasso set his brushes aside for almost a year and threw himself into writing what?
Poems
Poems. Verse led on to plays, and his Desire Caught by the Tail got a 1944 reading in occupied Paris with Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in the cast and Camus directing.