Who Painted That? Trivia Quiz

Answer: Grant Wood

"American Gothic" came about when, in 1930, the artist Grant Wood was being driven around the town of Eldon, Iowa looking for inspiration, and came across the Dibble House, a small white house that was built in what was known as Carpenter Gothic style. Having obtained the permission of the house's owners, Wood made an oil on paperboard sketch of the building, from which he proceeded to produce a painting not just of the house, but also including what he termed as "the kind of people [he] fancied should live in that house". So, he recruited his sister, Nan, and their family dentist, Dr Byron McKeeby, to act as models for the characters that Wood envisioned, an Iowa farmer and his daughter.

Upon its completion, the painting was entered in a competition at the Art Institute of Chicago, where it was awarded a bronze medal, with Wood winning a $300 cash prize, following persuasion of the jury by one of the museum's patrons. The same patron also persuaded the Art institute of Chicago to buy the painting. While art critics responded positively, people in Iowa resented it, as it was felt to make them appear as "grim-faced Bible thumpers". However, the worsening Great Depression led to a re-evaluation of popular opinion, with "American Gothic" coming to represent a depiction of the steadfast American pioneer spirit. The painting remains in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, and has become one of the most familiar images of 20th-century American art.

Answer: Lucian Freud

"Benefits Supervisor Sleeping" is a 1995 painting by British artist Lucien Freud. The painting depicts one of Freud's regular models, Sue Tilley, asleep on a sofa. As well as working as a model for Freud, who painted a number of large portraits of her between 1994 and 1996, Tilley was also working as a supervisor at Charing Cross Job Centre, a branch of the state run employment agency, which led to the title of the painting. Although the painting depicts the model asleep, this is merely the pose, as it required a number of sessions for the piece to be completed.

"Benefits Supervisor Sleeping" is regarded as the most famous of four large paintings Freud made of Sue Tilley. The painting was originally owned by Guy Naggar, a banker who served as chairman of the investment firm Dawnay Day. In May 2008, during the global financial crisis, Naggar sold the painting in an effort to raise capital for the company. At auction in New York, the painting was sold for $56.2m to Roman Abramovich, a Russian oligarch. At the time, it was the highest price ever paid for a painting by a living artist.

Answer: Henri Matisse

"Dance" is a painting by Henri Matisse that was produced as a commission for Russian businessman Sergei Shchukin, who was a noted collector of Matisse's work. Prior to the final piece, Matisse produced an initial version that came to be called "Dance (I)" in 1909, which shows the five dancing figures in the final version, but in less detail and using paler colours. The final work, an oil on canvas panel, displays the dancers in a deep red colour against a green and dark blue background. The work is described as displaying Matisse's interest in primitive art, and is seen as one of the key moments in his career, as well as a major development in modern painting.

"Dance" was first exhibited at the Salon d'Automne in Paris from October to November 1910, before being taken to Shchukin's house in Moscow, where it was displayed on the staircase alongside another of Matisse's works, where it remained until the Russian Revolution when it, along with the rest of Shchukin's collection, was appropriated by the new government. The painting remained in Shchukin's house, which became the State Museum of New Western Art, until 1948, when the museum was closed on the orders of Stalin. As a result, "Dance" was transferred to the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, in whose collection it remains. "Dance (I)", the preliminary sketch Matisse produced in 1909, is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Answer: Pablo Picasso

"Guernica" is an oil painting produced by Pablo Picasso in 1937. Regarded as one of his best known works, the painting was produced as a response to the bombing of the town of Guernica in the Basque Country by German and Italian forces fighting alongside the Spanish Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War. Picasso had originally been commissioned by the Spanish government to produce a mural for the Spanish pavilion at the 1937 World's Fair in Paris. The artist's original plan for the piece changed when he heard about the bombing of Guernica, having read an eyewitness account of the attack. The painting is in shades of grey, black and white, and contains a number of distinct images, including a bull, a gored horse, a dismembered soldier and screaming women.

"Guernica" was unveiled in July 1937 at the Paris International Exposition, alongside two other works that were sympathetic to the Spanish Republican cause in the war. After the end of the exposition, the painting was taken on a tour of Europe and the United States before Picasso entrusted it to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Although the government of General Franco sought to obtain the painting for display in Spain, Picasso determined that it would not be displayed there until the restoration of a Spanish republic. However, in 1981, eight years after the artist's death, and six years after the death of Franco, Spain, by now a constitutional monarchy, took possession of "Guernica", where it was initially displayed by the Prado before being moved to a special gallery at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in 1992.

Answer: Jackson Pollock

"No. 5, 1948" is the name given to a painting by Jackson Pollock, which was produced during what came to be known as the artist's "drip period", when works by Pollock were produced by his laying the painting surface flat on the floor, and then pouring or splashing paint onto the surface. The painting consists of grey, brown, white and yellow paint that has been put onto the surface (fibreboard) in a pattern that has been perceived as a "dense bird's nest". The painting's name came from the period when Pollock insisted on simply numbering his works, rather than giving them formal names, with this piece being the fifth he produced in 1948.

In early 1949, Pollock displayed the painting in an exhibition of his work at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York City, where it was purchased for $1500 by the artist Alfonso Ossorio, who was an admirer of Pollock and his work. However, in transport, the painting was damaged, which led to Pollock offering to repair and rework it for Ossario. However, rather than simply repairing the existing piece, he repainted it, presenting the new version to its owner. Ownership of "No. 5, 1948" passed from Ossario to media mogul Samuel Newhouse Jr, and then to music and film producer David Geffen. In 2006, Geffen reportedly sold the painting in a private sale for approximately $140m.

Answer: Andy Warhol

"Reigning Queens" is a series of silkscreen prints produced by Andy Warhol in 1985. The series consists of a total of four sets of four prints, with each set showing one of the then queens regnant (queen reigning in her own right) - Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, Margarethe II of Denmark, Beatrix of the Netherlands and Ntfombi Twala of Swaziland (now Eswatini). The images used came from official photographs of each woman, which were then overlaid with the blocks of colour that came to be a trademark of Warhol's work. Warhol went on to produce to produce an additional set of prints that he termed the "Royal Edition", in which diamond dust and ground-up glass was applied while the ink was still wet.

The series was exhibited in New York at the Leo Castelli Gallery from September to October 1985. The fact that the series was exhibited in the United States annoyed Warhol, as he intended that they only be shown in Europe, suggesting that, because no one in the US cared about royalty, the exhibition would give him another bad review. Ownership of the work is in multiple hands owing to the fact that there are many individual prints in the series, with four of the Royal Edition prints of Elizabeth II purchased by the Royal Collection in 2012 as part of the celebrations of her Diamond Jubilee - these remain the only portraits of Elizabeth II in the collection that she didn't sit for.

Answer: Gustav Klimt

"The Kiss" is a piece by Gustav Klimt consisting of oil paint on canvas, plus added gold leaf. Depicting a couple locked in an embrace on a gold background, the painting evokes the style of Art Nouveau and the Arts and Crafts Movement, which were prominent at the time the piece was produced. The use of gold leaf in the painting stemmed from a trip that Klimt made to Italy in 1903, during which he saw Byzantine era mosaics that made use of gold leaf to enhance their brilliance, and inspired the artist to make use of gold leaf in his own work.

Completed in 1908, "The Kiss" was first exhibited in the Kunstschau, a gallery created in Vienna to commemorate the Diamond Jubilee of the Austrian Emperor, Franz Josef I; the catalogue produced for the exhibition referred to the painting as "The Lovers". At the time, Klimt's reputation had been damaged following his creation of a series of paintings for the ceiling of the University of Vienna's Great Hall. However, "The Kiss" was enthusiastically received, and was purchased, while still unfinished, by the Austrian government. Today, the painting forms part of the collection of the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere in Vienna.

Answer: Salvador Dali

"The Persistence of Memory", sometimes referred to descriptively as "Melting Clocks", is a 1931 piece by Salvador Dali, and is regarded not just as one of the artist's most well known works, but one of the most recognisable works of Surrealism. The painting features a number of elements that Dali often included in his work - the landscape in the background is a tip of Cap de Creus, a peninsula in the north-east of Catalonia, as Dali often included landscapes inspired by his childhood in Catalonia; one of the clocks is covered in ants, which the artist used as a symbol of decay, while the realist technique used in the painting is intended to show imagery that might be visualised in a dream.

Dali's painting was first exhibited at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1932 before, in 1934, it was donated to the Museum of Modern Art, in whose collection it has been ever since. Dali returned to "The Persistence of Memory" in 1954 when he produced a follow-up, "The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory", which depicts the original splitting apart into regular blocks. This second piece is part of the collection of the Salvador Dalí Museum in St Petersburg, Florida.

Answer: Rene Magritte

"The Treachery of Images" is a 1929 painting by Rene Magritte depicting a pipe, underneath which the artist has written the words "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" ("This is not a pipe"). Magritte explained the meaning of the painting by pointing out that, rather than it being an actual pipe, it was a representation of a pipe instead. This is taken as a visual representation of subtext, or meta-message, when the audience comes to understand the meaning of a work on its own. "The Treachery of Images" was one of a number of similar pieces produced by Magritte during the 1920s.

During the period that Magritte painted "The Treachery of Images", he had a contract to produce work for Galerie Le Centaure in Brussels. However, the failure of his first exhibition led to his deciding to move to Paris, which saw him included in a 1929 exhibition alongside other Surrealist artists at the Goemans Gallery. Today, "The Treachery of Images" forms part of the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which purchased the painting in 1978.

Answer: Roy Lichtenstein

"Whaam!" is a diptych painting produced by Roy Lichtenstein in 1963. Consisting of a pair of panels, the painting was inspired by a panel from DC Comics' "All-American Men of War" #89. The panel from the comic book depicts a jet fighter engaged in combat with other jets; Lichtenstein changed the aircraft in his piece, possibly using artwork from other issues of the same comic book title as inspiration. The theme of aerial combat was one that the artist often used in his work during the 1960s, as comic book artwork was often an inspiration for his paintings. The painting's title is prominently displayed as an onomatopoeia on the right hand panel

Lichtenstein's diptych was first exhibited at the artist's second solo exhibition, at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in September and October 1963. In 1966, it was purchased by the Tate Gallery in London, an act that caused a degree of controversy, particularly among some of the gallery's trustees, who objected to its purchase. This was countered by the Tate's director, who stated that "Whaam!" had aroused more interest than any other work that the Tate Gallery had purchased since World War II. "Whaam!" has been on permanent display at the Tate Modern in London since 2006.