Q 01/05

Matisse led which movement, named after the French for 'wild beasts'?

A) Fauvism

B) Cubism

C) Dadaism

D) Futurism

Answer · why

A) Fauvism

Fauvism got its name at a Paris salon in 1905, when a critic looked at the blazing canvases hung around one classical statue and joked that it stood a...

Q 02/05

Which creatures appear in at least nine Matisse paintings, among them a famous 1912 canvas now in Moscow?

A) Doves

B) Parakeets

C) Tortoises

D) Goldfish

Answer · why

D) Goldfish

Goldfish: on his travels he had watched people sit for hours gazing dreamily into fish bowls, and the creatures became his own emblem of calm.

Q 03/05

Matisse first painted at twenty, with a paint box from his mother, while recovering from what?

A) Tuberculosis

B) A broken leg

C) Typhoid fever

D) Appendicitis

Answer · why

D) Appendicitis

Appendicitis kept him at home for months; he started by copying the colour prints that came in the box, and within two years he had quit his job to st...

Q 04/05

What had Matisse studied in Paris before he took up painting?

A) Architecture

B) Medicine

C) Law

D) Music

Answer · why

C) Law

Law: he qualified in Paris and went home to clerk in a lawyer's office, a job he found so tedious that painting, once he tried it, took over, to the d...

Q 05/05

Matisse described his late way of making pictures from painted paper as "drawing with" what?

A) A razor blade

B) Scissors

C) A palette knife

D) His fingers

Answer · why

B) Scissors

Scissors: assistants brushed sheets of paper with gouache, and he cut straight into the colour, often from his bed, deciding where each shape was pinn...