Pop Art Trivia
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50 free Pop Art trivia questions with answers — pop culture quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Pop art took soup cans, comic strips and movie stars and hung them on museum walls, and it has never really left. This quiz runs from the London Independent Group of the 1950s, Eduardo Paolozzi's collages and Richard Hamilton's famous 1956 living room, to New York in the 1960s: Andy Warhol's 32 Campbell's Soup Cans at the Ferus Gallery, the Marilyn silkscreens, the Silver Factory, the Velvet Underground and the day Valerie Solanas shot Warhol; Roy Lichtenstein's Ben-Day dots, Whaam! and Drowning Girl; Claes Oldenburg's giant spoon, Jasper Johns's Flag, Robert Rauschenberg's Combines, James Rosenquist's F-111 and Tom Wesselmann's Great American Nude. It also covers what came around it and after: the Dada roots, the reaction against abstract expressionism, the museum shows that made pop official, Peter Blake and Sgt. Pepper, Keith Haring's subway chalk drawings, and pop art's cousins in France, Russia, Japan, Belgium and New Zealand. Easy questions ask who painted the soup cans and what Lichtenstein borrowed from; the expert tier asks for dates, galleries and record prices. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on pop art, the artists and the individual works, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question. If you like this, try our quizzes on Andy Warhol, modern art and famous paintings.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which two countries did pop art emerge in the mid-to-late 1950s?
The UK and the US
The UK and the US: British artists studied American consumer imagery from afar while New York became the hotbed almost simultaneously.
Q 02Which London circle, founded in 1952, is regarded as the precursor to pop art?
The Independent Group
The Independent Group, meeting at London's ICA from 1952, brought Paolozzi, Hamilton and Alloway together to debate advertising, movies, comics and science fiction.
Q 03Whose 1947 collage I was a Rich Man's Plaything holds the first use of 'pop' in art?
Eduardo Paolozzi
Eduardo Paolozzi's 1947 collage I was a Rich Man's Plaything shows the word 'Pop!' bursting from a revolver's smoke cloud, the earliest appearance of the word in art.
Q 04Which British critic is usually credited with coining the term 'pop art'?
Lawrence Alloway
Lawrence Alloway, the British critic behind the 1958 essay 'The Arts and the Mass Media', is usually credited with coining 'pop art', though he said he meant mass-media products, not art about them.
Q 05Who made the 1956 collage Just what is it that makes today's homes so different...?
Richard Hamilton
Richard Hamilton made the collage for the catalogue and poster of the 1956 This Is Tomorrow exhibition at London's Whitechapel Gallery; it is counted among the earliest pop works.
Q 06Which earlier movement's use of found imagery did pop art draw on and extend?
Dada
Pop swapped Dada's anarchic satire for a detached affirmation of mass culture.
Q 07Pop art is widely seen as a reaction against which dominant American movement?
Abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism's painterly looseness was what pop artists set out to defuse with impersonal, mundane reality and parody, though pop is also seen as an extension of it.
Q 08Whose December 1962 'Symposium on Pop Art' officially introduced the term?
The Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art staged its 'Symposium on Pop Art' in December 1962, moderated by curator Peter Selz, which gave the term official currency in America.
Q 09Which 1962 Pasadena show is regarded as the first museum exhibition of American pop art?
New Painting of Common Objects
New Painting of Common Objects, curated by Walter Hopps at the Pasadena Art Museum in autumn 1962, showed Lichtenstein, Warhol, Dine, Thiebaud and Ruscha.
Q 10How many paintings make up Andy Warhol's original Campbell's Soup Cans series?
32
Warhol's 1962 series comprises 32 canvases, one for each soup variety Campbell's then sold, each 20 by 16 inches.
Q 11Which gallery first exhibited Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans in July 1962?
Ferus Gallery
Irving Blum showed the 32 canvases at his Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in July 1962; only about five sold, so he bought them back to keep the set together.
Q 12Which actor reserved Campbell's Soup Can (Tomato) before the 1962 show even opened?
Dennis Hopper
Blum later persuaded the early buyers to sell back so the 32 could stay together.
Q 13Warhol's Marilyn silkscreens are based on a publicity still from which 1953 film?
Niagara
Gene Kornman took the photograph.
Q 21Warhol's best-known sculptures are silkscreened wooden replicas of the shipping cartons for which product?
Brillo soap pads
Brillo soap pads came 24 to a box, and Warhol's Brillo Boxes copied the carton, itself designed by commercial artist James Harvey, in silkscreen ink on wood.
Q 22How long is Warhol's 1965 film Empire, a static shot of the Empire State Building?
Eight hours
Empire runs just over eight hours: Warhol filmed the Empire State Building for six and a half hours in July 1964 and projected the footage at a slowed 16 frames per second.
Q 23In which city was Andy Warhol born, to Rusyn immigrant parents?
Pittsburgh
Q 14What did Dorothy Podber do to a stack of Warhol's Marilyn canvases in 1964?
Fired a revolver through them
Warhol thought she wanted to photograph them; the repaired works became the Shot Marilyns.
Q 15How much did Shot Sage Blue Marilyn fetch in 2022, an auction record for an American artist?
$195 million
Shot Sage Blue Marilyn sold at Christie's New York in May 2022 for $195 million, beating the $105 million paid for Warhol's Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) in 2013.
Q 16What covered the walls of Warhol's first Factory studio on East 47th Street?
Silver paint and aluminium foil
Billy Name covered the walls in silver paint and aluminium foil in 1964, earning the East 47th Street studio the nickname the Silver Factory.
Q 17Who shot Andy Warhol at the Factory in June 1968?
Valerie Solanas
Valerie Solanas, author of the SCUM Manifesto and a bit player in Warhol's film I, a Man, shot him at the Factory on 3 June 1968.
Q 18Which experimental rock band did Warhol manage and let rehearse at the Factory?
The Velvet Underground
The Velvet Underground's debut was 'produced' by Warhol in the sense that he paid for the studio time, and he drew its banana cover.
Q 19Warhol designed the cover of which 1971 Rolling Stones album?
Sticky Fingers
Warhol conceived the Sticky Fingers cover: a close-up of a jeans-clad crotch fitted with a real working zipper, with the package designed by Craig Braun.
Q 20Which magazine did Warhol found after the Factory became a business enterprise?
Interview
Warhol founded Interview in 1969 with British journalist John Wilcock; it became known for long, lightly edited celebrity-to-celebrity conversations.
Warhol was born in Pittsburgh in 1928 and studied at the city's Carnegie Institute of Technology before moving to New York in 1949.
Q 24With which younger artist did Warhol make more than 50 collaborative works in 1984–85?
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat painted more than 50 joint canvases in 1984–85; their September 1985 show at Tony Shafrazi's gallery drew reviews that soured the friendship.
Q 25What operation did Warhol undergo the day before he died in February 1987?
Gallbladder surgery
Gallbladder surgery on February 21; his surgeon found the organ 'on the verge of perforating', and Warhol died the next day in New York Hospital.
Q 26What printing technique did Roy Lichtenstein painstakingly replicate by hand?
Ben-Day dots
Lichtenstein hand-painted Ben-Day dots, the uniform dot screens of cheap comic-book printing, through perforated metal stencils, mimicking mechanical reproduction at monumental scale.
Q 27Which 1961 painting was Lichtenstein's first pop work based on a cartoon character?
Look Mickey
Look Mickey (1961), showing Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse fishing, was Lichtenstein's first pop painting; he began the cartoon works after teaching beside Allan Kaprow at Rutgers.
Q 28Which London institution bought Lichtenstein's diptych Whaam! in 1966?
The Tate Gallery
The Tate Gallery bought Whaam! in 1966, three years after Lichtenstein painted the 1.7 by 4 metre diptych; the work passed to Tate Modern's collection.
Q 29What does the left panel of Whaam! show?
A fighter plane firing a rocket
The left panel shows a fighter plane firing a rocket; the right panel shows the target plane exploding in flames beneath the giant 'WHAAM!' lettering.
Q 30Whose comic-book panel from a 1962 war comic was the primary source for Whaam!?
Irv Novick
Lichtenstein turned the single panel into a diptych.