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
British artists studied American consumer imagery from afar; 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
Its young painters, architects and critics debated 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
The word bursts from a cloud of smoke emerging from a revolver.
Q 04Which British critic is usually credited with coining the term 'pop art'?
Lawrence Alloway
He later insisted he had meant the products of mass media, not art about them.
Q 05Who made the 1956 collage Just what is it that makes today's homes so different...?
Richard Hamilton
It was produced for the Independent Group's This Is Tomorrow exhibition and is considered 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
Pop artists used impersonal, mundane reality and parody to defuse its painterly looseness.
Q 08Whose December 1962 'Symposium on Pop Art' officially introduced the term?
The Museum of Modern Art
By then American advertising had itself adopted many elements of modern art.
Q 09Which 1962 Pasadena show is regarded as the first museum exhibition of American pop art?
New Painting of Common Objects
Walter Hopps curated it, with Lichtenstein, Warhol, Dine, Thiebaud and Ruscha.
Q 10How many paintings make up Andy Warhol's original Campbell's Soup Cans series?
32
Each shows a different variety of soup on a 20-by-16-inch canvas.
Q 11Where in Los Angeles were the Campbell's Soup Cans first exhibited in July 1962?
Ferus Gallery
Only five or six sold, so dealer Irving Blum 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 21Which product's shipping boxes did Warhol replicate in his best-known sculptures?
Brillo soap pads
The original box design was by commercial artist James Harvey.
Q 22How long is Warhol's 1965 film Empire, a static shot of the Empire State Building?
Eight hours
Sleep, the year before, showed poet John Giorno asleep for over five hours.
Q 23In which city was Andy Warhol born, to Rusyn immigrant parents?
Pittsburgh
He studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology there before moving to New York in 1949.
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
Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) had fetched $105 million in 2013.
Q 16What covered the walls of Warhol's first Factory studio on East 47th Street?
Silver paint and aluminium foil
Hence the nickname the Silver Factory.
Q 17Who shot Andy Warhol at the Factory in June 1968?
Valerie Solanas
She had written the SCUM Manifesto and appeared in his film I, a Man.
Q 18Which experimental rock band did Warhol manage and let rehearse at the Factory?
The Velvet Underground
He 'produced' their debut album by paying for the studio time and drew its banana cover.
Q 19Warhol designed the cover of which 1971 Rolling Stones album?
Sticky Fingers
He came up with the concept and did the photography.
Q 20Which magazine did Warhol found after the Factory became a business enterprise?
Interview
It later shared premises with the Factory at 33 Union Square.
Q 24With which younger artist did Warhol make more than 50 collaborative works in 1984–85?
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Warhol silkscreened logos and headlines that his partner then painted over.
Q 25What operation did Warhol undergo the day before he died in February 1987?
Gallbladder surgery
His surgeon found the organ 'on the verge of perforating'.
Q 26What printing technique did Roy Lichtenstein painstakingly replicate by hand?
Ben-Day dots
They mimic mechanical reproduction on a monumental scale.
Q 27Which 1961 painting was Lichtenstein's first pop work based on a cartoon character?
Look Mickey
He began his cartoon paintings after teaching alongside Allan Kaprow at Rutgers.
Q 28Which London institution bought Lichtenstein's diptych Whaam! in 1966?
The Tate Gallery
It has been on permanent display at Tate Modern since 2006.
Q 29What does the left panel of Whaam! show?
A fighter plane firing a rocket
In the right panel a second plane explodes in flames beneath the giant onomatopoeia.
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.