The Real, the Surreal, and the Fantastic Quiz

Though educated in Paris, Marcel Duchamp was mainly an autodidact who learned not only from art but from the technology of his time. One of Duchamp's early works is "Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2" (1912), which was influenced not only by Dadaism and Fauvism, but also by chronophotography, a Victorian/Edwardian photographic technique which presents multiple stills of movement.

Duchamp also invented the readymade, the technique of turning everyday objects into art. The pictured work "L.H.O.O.Q." (1919) is one such readymade, in which he took a postcard of the Mona Lisa and added a mustache and a goatee. Reading the letters out loud in French is also supposed to be a pun for a vulgar expression.

From Livorno, Italy, Amadeo Modigliani is best-known for his sculptures, his paintings of nudes, and his portraits of friends, family, lovers, and fellow artists. The influence from African art is evident in that his portraits all have elongated forms and mask-like faces. Shown here is "La Femme à l'éventail" or "Woman with a Fan" (1919), a depiction of Lunia Czechowska, a close friend and confidante of the artist, and one of his favorite subjects to paint.

Modigliani did not receive much acclaim during his lifetime, but after his death at age 35 from tuberculosis, he came to be regarded as one of the great twentieth-century artists.

Swiss-born German artist Paul Klee turned from landscapes and caricatures to experimentation with color. His lectures and writings on the theory of color, design, and form are regarded as being as important to art history as Leonardo da Vinci's "A Treatise on Painting".

Klee liked to synthesize many movements and genres into his work. Pictured here is "Tale à la Hoffmann" (1921), a watercolor on paper inspired by the stories of the German Romantic author E.T.A. Hoffmann. The harmonious color palette is soothing and appropriate for a nursery, and the lines are precise yet only suggest animals and figures from Hoffmann's tales without actually depicting any!

Originally a commercial artist, Georgia O'Keefe came to the attention of photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who exhibited her work in his New York gallery and became her promoter and eventually her husband. Despite age-related vision problems, O'Keefe painted well into her old age.

Breaking new ground for women artists (and indeed all artists), O'Keefe may be best known for her paintings of New York skyscrapers, New Mexico landscapes, and beautiful flowers, such as the one illustrated here, "Red Canna" (1923), all of which are so extremely close up that they are almost abstractions.

Although Dutch-born Piet Mondrian started with naturalistic landscapes (rather like Paul Klee), his exposure to Cubism in Paris moved him to abstraction. He co-founded the De Stijl (The Style) art movement, which was about reducing art to its basic colors and forms.

Mondrian then turned to Nieuwe Beelding or neoplasticism, all about vertical and horizontal lines outlining blocked primary colors along with black and white. His "Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow" (1930) shown here, is a perfect example.

A master of multiple art media, Pablo Picasso co-founded Cubism (the deconstruction and reassembly of objects into abstract form) and inspired Abstract Realism and Surrealism (which in turn inspired him).

Picasso's work is often divided into the Blue Period (1901-1904), the Rose Period (1904-1906), the African Art and Primitivist period (1906-1909), the Cubist period (1909-1919), a period of Neoclassicism and Surrealism (1919-1929), and later works of various styles (1930-1971).

This next-to-last one is exemplified by the painting "Guernica" (1937), reproduced here in a tiled mural in the actual town of Guernica, in the Basque Country of northern Spain. Picasso would not shy from using his art to make a political statement, and so in "Guernica" he unflinchingly depicts the horrors of the Spanish Civil War.

Edward Hopper, an American and a realist, started his career as an illustrator for magazine ads. He travelled to Paris and brought its influence back home, though he also created his own distinctive style. Much of his work depicts the isolation of modern life, such as with "Nighthawks" (1942), pictured here.

His use of light and dark and his penchant for geometric forms are evident in this best-known work of his. An earlier painting, "House by the Railroad" (1925), influenced the design of the house used in film director Alfred Hitchcock's thriller "Psycho" (1960).

Best known for self-portraits, still lifes, and character studies, American artist Ivan Albright has been called the "master of the macabre" and an exemplar of the Magical Realist style.

Albright's work here is "Picture of Dorian Gray" (1943-44), used in the 1945 movie of the same name, adapted from a story by Oscar Wilde and starring Hurd Hatfield (in the title role) and Angela Lansbury. As Gray descends into debauchery and corruption, he does not age, but rather his likeness becomes uglier and uglier, until this final grotesquerie emerges. Although the movie was in black-and-white, when the camera cut to the portrait it was in vivid Technicolor -- shocking audiences at the time. Housed at the Art Institute of Chicago, the painting is regarded as one of Albright's, and America's, masterpieces.

A master of surrealism, Salvador Dalí was born in the region of Catalonia, Spain. While attending the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid, he was already known for the rebellion and artistic heterodoxy and bizarre idiosyncracies that would characterize his career. With his flamboyant mustache and general public outrageousness, he developed quite a cult of personality and a genius for self-promotion in addition to his innovative art.

One of Dalí's most popular paintings, "The Persistence of Memory" (1931), depicts melting clocks drooping and hanging about a barren landscape. Based on that work he created the bronze sculpture seen here, entitled "La Noblesse du Temps" or "The Nobility of Time" (1984). There are figures on it that may be hard to see, including a pensive angel and a hopeful woman. The statue stands in the Plaça de la Rotonda in the center of Andorra Vella, in the tiny country of Andorra.

The child of Slovakian immigrants, commercial illustrator Andy Warhol became the king of the Pop Art movement of the 1960s in the United States. He loved to use repetition of images to reflect the propagation in mass media of what we would now call memes. Among his iconic works are a collection of 32 canvasses of Campbell's soup cans and the Marilyn Triptych shown here, a study of movie star Marilyn Monroe that reflects Warhol's fascination with the commodification of celebrity, people -- indeed, everything in American culture.