Surrealism Trivia
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59 free Surrealism trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This surrealism trivia quiz covers the movement that set out, in André Breton's words, to resolve dream and reality into a super-reality. It begins with the origins: Apollinaire's coinage, Dada, Freud, automatic writing, the 1924 manifesto and the rival who lost the name, the exquisite corpse game and de Chirico's empty arcades. Then it turns to the artists everyone knows and the details they may not: why Dalí's watches melt, what he wore to lecture in London, who Gala was, and what Breton's nickname 'Avida Dollars' really is; Magritte's pipe, apple, veiled lovers and wartime forgeries; Ernst's frottage and Loplop; Miró, Man Ray and Meret Oppenheim's fur teacup. There are questions on the films (the razor and the eye, the pianos full of donkeys, the L'Age d'Or riot, Hitchcock's Spellbound), on the women of the movement (Carrington, Tanning, Varo, Kahlo and the ribbon around a bomb) and on the politics and exhibitions that carried Surrealism from Paris to New York and Mexico. About a third of the questions are easy; the rest reward anyone who has spent time in MoMA or the Pompidou. Try our Salvador Dalí and modern art quizzes next. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Surrealism, its artists and their works, and each explanation adds one more detail.
30 of 59 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who coined the word 'surrealism' in 1917?
Guillaume Apollinaire
Guillaume Apollinaire. He never saw what became of his word: weakened by a war wound, he died of Spanish flu in 1918, six years before André Breton took it up for his manifesto.
Q 02Which earlier movement, born of disgust at World War I, most directly influenced Surrealism?
Dada
Dada. Breton and his friends threw themselves into Dada's stunts after the war, then broke away, wanting to build something from the unconscious where Dada only tore things down.
Q 03In the word Surrealism, what does the French prefix 'sur' mean?
Beyond
Beyond. The aim, in the words of the 1924 manifesto, was to join dream and waking life in 'an absolute reality, a surreality'.
Q 04Breton's 1924 manifesto defined surrealism as pure what?
Psychic automatism
Psychic automatism. Painters took the idea up as well: André Masson let his pen move across the paper with no plan at all, drawing straight from the unconscious.
Q 05Before founding Surrealism, André Breton had trained in what field?
Medicine and psychiatry
Medicine and psychiatry. Posted to a wartime military hospital in Nantes, he met the young Jacques Vaché, whose scorn for art and convention marked him for life: 'it is Jacques Vaché to whom I owe the most.'
Q 06Which thinker's ideas about the unconscious underpinned Surrealism?
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud wrote that he had been inclined to think the Surrealists, who had adopted him as their patron saint, complete fools, until a visit from Dalí changed his mind.
Q 07What was The Magnetic Fields (1920), Breton's joint work from four years before his manifesto?
A text of automatic writing
A text of automatic writing, the first of its kind: Breton and a fellow poet wrote it at speed, refusing to censor or correct a word, to catch thought before reason could tidy it up.
Q 08Which long-neglected poet's line about a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table became a Surrealist touchstone?
Comte de Lautréamont
Comte de Lautréamont was the pen name of Isidore Ducasse, dead at 24. Man Ray paid tribute to the line by wrapping a sewing machine in cloth, tying it up and calling it The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse.
Q 09What was the name of the journal launched in 1924 by the Bureau of Surrealist Research?
La Révolution surréaliste
La Révolution surréaliste ran for twelve issues. In the last, in 1929, Breton printed his Second Manifesto and denounced former members, several of whom had gathered around the rival review Documents.
Q 10In the Surrealist game exquisite corpse, what does each player do before passing the paper on?
Folds over their part
Folds over their part, so nobody sees what came before. The first sentence the Surrealists made this way, 'The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine', gave the game its name.
Q 11Which artist's 'metaphysical' paintings of arcades, long shadows and mannequins influenced the Surrealists?
Giorgio de Chirico
Giorgio de Chirico lost the Surrealists' favour in the 1920s when he turned to a traditional style, and took his revenge by painting backdated copies of the early pictures they loved.
Q 12Which self-taught Surrealist took up painting on the spot after seeing a canvas in a gallery window?
Yves Tanguy
Yves Tanguy was a former merchant sailor who had never had a lesson. He was riding a bus when the window display caught his eye, and he jumped off to get a closer look.
Q 13In which Catalan town was Salvador Dalí born in 1904?
Figueres
Q 21Which sweet brand's logo did Dalí design in 1969?
Chupa Chups
Chupa Chups went straight to the top for its wrapper: the founder asked Dalí himself, who set the brand name inside a bright daisy shape, by one account in under an hour.
Q 22What kind of animal was Babou, the pet Dalí took to restaurants on a leash in the 1960s?
An ocelot
An ocelot. When a fellow diner took fright at the spotted cat tethered to his table, Dalí assured her it was an ordinary cat that he had painted over in an op-art design.
Q 23Which sea creature sits on the receiver of the telephone Dalí designed in 1936?
A lobster
A lobster. Dalí made the telephones for the English poet Edward James, who supported him for two years and had them installed around his own house in Sussex.
Figueres is also where Dalí rests: he turned the burnt-out shell of the town's old theatre into his Theatre-Museum and is buried in a crypt beneath its stage.
Q 14Dalí said the soft watches in The Persistence of Memory were inspired not by relativity but by what?
Camembert melting in the sun
Camembert melting in the sun was Dalí's own account of the limp watches. The dream has a real address, though: the golden cliffs behind them are the coast of Catalonia near his home.
Q 15Which museum owns Dalí's The Persistence of Memory?
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Museum of Modern Art, New York: in 1934 an anonymous friend of the museum bought the little canvas from the dealer Julien Levy purely to give it away, and it has stayed in the collection ever since.
Q 16What covers the orange watch that does not melt in The Persistence of Memory?
Ants
Ants meant decay to Dalí, so here they swarm over metal as if it were rotting flesh. He had already used them in the film Un Chien Andalou, crawling out of a hole in a man's hand.
Q 17What did Dalí call his technique for finding the double images in his paintings?
The paranoiac-critical method
The paranoiac-critical method meant working himself into a delusional state while staying sane enough to paint what he saw. 'The difference between a madman and me', he said, 'is that I am not mad.'
Q 18What did Dalí wear to deliver a lecture at the 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition?
A deep-sea diving suit
A deep-sea diving suit, he said, showed that he was plunging into the depths of the human mind. He began to suffocate mid-lecture and had to be freed from the helmet.
Q 19Breton's mocking nickname for Salvador Dalí, 'Avida Dollars', is what kind of play on the painter's name?
An anagram
An anagram: the same twelve letters, rearranged to mean 'eager for dollars'. It was Breton's verdict on a painter who had taken to designing jewellery and shop windows for money.
Q 20Dalí designed the dream sequence for which 1945 Alfred Hitchcock film?
Spellbound
Spellbound came out of Dalí's years in America. His next film job there, the cartoon Destino for Walt Disney, was shelved in the 1940s and not finished by the studio until 2003.
Q 24Dalí's wife and muse Gala was born Elena Diakonova in which country?
Russia
Russia. Born in Kazan, Gala was married to the poet Paul Éluard when the couple came to visit Dalí in 1929; she was ten years older than the painter, and she stayed.
Q 25What French caption is painted beneath the object in Magritte's The Treachery of Images?
Ceci n'est pas une pipe
Ceci n'est pas une pipe means 'This is not a pipe', and the caption is right: what hangs on the wall is a painted image, and nobody could fill it with tobacco and smoke it.
Q 26What hides the man's face in Magritte's 1964 self-portrait The Son of Man?
A green apple
A green apple floats in front of the face because, Magritte said, everything we see hides another thing, and we always want to see what is hidden by what we see.
Q 27In Magritte's The Lovers (1928), the kissing couple's heads are wrapped in what?
White cloth
White cloth. Legend says Magritte, as a boy, saw his drowned mother pulled from the river with her nightdress over her face, but later research has discredited the story.
Q 28Magritte's Golconda (1953) fills the sky over red-roofed houses with dozens of what?
Men in bowler hats and overcoats
Men in bowler hats and overcoats, the suburban uniform Magritte wore himself: his hatted figures are often read as self-portraits of a painter who chose a quiet middle-class life.
Q 29What was Magritte's nationality?
Belgian
Belgian. Magritte spent three years near Paris among Breton's Surrealists, but when his gallery contract ended in 1930 he went home to Brussels and back to advertising work to pay the bills.
Q 30According to his friend Marcel Mariën, what did Magritte secretly do with his brother to raise money?
Forge paintings and banknotes
Forge paintings and banknotes: Mariën said he sold the fake modern masters himself while Magritte's brother printed the money. Scholars still dispute how much of the tale is true.