"Ceci n'est pas une pipe" Trivia Quiz

Answer: Henri Matisse

Henri Émile Benoît Matisse (1869-1954) was one of the pioneers of the new directions taken by European art during the early years of the 20th century. He was known both as a sculptor and a painter. His earliest work was fairly traditional, but around 1900 he became one of the leaders of the Fauvism movement, named after the artists described by French critics as 'Les Fauves' (the Beasts) for their emphasis on the use of strong color rather than realistic representation.

The movement, which lasted from about 1900 until around 1910, was considered to be an evolutionary development of the Expressionism and Impressionism of the late 19th century.

The display of their work at the 1905 Salon d'Autonne aroused a great deal of controversy, with Matisse's 'Woman With a Hat' being particularly singled out.

Answer: Marcel Duchamp

Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), like Matisse, was one of those who led the way as European artists explored new ways of conveying their perception of the world in the early part of the 20th century. He developed a fascination with conveying the fourth dimension (time) in his work, and 'Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2' shows a series of stylised images of a human body in overlapping positions, as would be seen in a series of snapshots taken at close intervals and overlaid on each other. It was submitted to the Cubist Salon des Indépendants, but the organiser asked him to either rename or withdraw the painting, so he took it home. It was later displayed at the 1913 Armory Show in New York City, which brought experimental European art to the attention of the American art public.

Around the time of World War I, Duchamp decided to abandon what he called retinal art (aimed to be understood by simple vision) and moved to more cerebral forms of art, becoming a leader of the Dada movement. Perhaps his best-known Dada piece was 'Fountain', a urinal which he submitted to the Society of Independent Artists display in 1917 as an example of what he called Readymade Art, finding artistic significance in everyday objects. It was rejected on the grounds that it was not art. In 2004, a group of 500 artists and art historians selected it as the most significant work of the 20th century.

Answer: Joan Miró

Joan Miró i Ferrà (1893-1983) was a Surrealist painter responsible for declaring that "the assassination of painting" was an essential part of his work. By this, he meant that art needed to challenge established norms, because he saw conventional painting as fundamentally supporting a bourgeois society which was in urgent need of reform.

His earliest work was clearly inspired by the paintings of van Gogh and Cezanne, but after he moved from Barcelona to Paris around 1920 he developed his own style, which had a distinctly nationalistic theme.

The importance of using symbolic elements in his work made Surrealism, with its emphasis on dreams and the subconscious, an obvious movement for him to be considered a part of (although he never completely abandoned representational painting, and never called himself a Surrealist).

Answer: Piet Mondrian

Pieter Cornelis "Piet" Mondrian (1872-1944) was a Dutch painter known for his geometric art. Like many of the other artists featured in this quiz, he started working in a naturalistic style, but he moved away from representational painting to more abstract work.

In 1914, he wrote, "I construct lines and color combinations on a flat surface, in order to express general beauty with the utmost awareness. Nature (or, that which I see) inspires me, puts me, as with any painter, in an emotional state so that an urge comes about to make something, but I want to come as close as possible to the truth and abstract everything from that, until I reach the foundation (still just an external foundation!) of things." This led to the paintings for which he is most famous, which use bright blocks of color, mostly in primary colors, but including white areas, and black lines. Although the paintings appear simplistic, almost childlike, on first glance, closer inspection shows careful texturing with brush strokes, and subtle variations in line thickness that are intended to convey how the dynamic tension between different parts of the painting reflects the fundamental beauty of the world, and its spiritual dimension. (At least, such was Mondrian's oft-stated intention.)

Answer: Salvador Dalí

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, Marquis of Dalí de Púbol (1904-1989) is possibly the first name most people think of when Surrealism is mentioned, and this is one of his most familiar works, with its desert landscape and melting watches. They are said to reflect the fact that time is variable, according to the observer, as proposed by Einstein's theory of Relativity, which was quite the intellectual rage at the time. True to his enigmatic persona, Dali maintained that they were inspired by seeing a wheel of Camembert cheese softening and melting on a hot day.

Dalí did not confine his efforts to the traditional arts of painting and sculpture. He was involved in theatrical set design and film (producing several works with Luis Buñuel, the dream sequence of Hitchcock's 'Spellbound'), photography, fashion, architecture, literature, and more. It has been said that his greatest artistic creation was the flamboyant persona he created for himself (suggested as a form of performance art), with his waxed moustache and outrageous behavior, which included the pet ocelot who used to travel with him, and the anteater he carried onto a television talk show.

Answer: Paul Klee

Paul Klee (1879-1940) produced work that showed the influences of a number of styles, including Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism, but his name is most often associated with the Bauhaus school, where he taught from 1921 until 1931. 'Ad Parnassum', often described as his masterpiece, was produced shortly after he left the Bauhaus and moved to Dusseldorf.

It uses a style that Klee called Divisionism, which is reminiscent of the Pointillism of the 1880s. The impression of a temple is conveyed through the patterns produced by placing white dots over underlying blocks of color, which blend to produce walls, a gate or door, a roof (or is it a pyramid?), the sky - all without any of these features being clearly delineated.

Answer: Pablo Picasso

Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso (1881-1973) is generally referred to as the founder of Cubism, but he engaged in a wide range of artistic endeavours, and his work went through multiple stages. These included the Blue Period (1901-1904), the Rose Period (1904-1906), the African and Primitive Period (1907-1909), the Analytic Cubist Period (1909-1912), the Synthetic Cubist Period (1912-1919), the Neoclassical and Surrealist Period (1919-1929), and the Later Period when the diversity of his work made it difficult to categorise.

'Guernica' is one of his best-known works, painted as a commentary on the brutality of war after German and Italian planes bombed the Basque village of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. I won't try to describe the painting in any detail - it is a collection of a number of fragmentary images painted with a grey palette (meaning it uses black, white, and a range of shades of grey) which give an impression of chaos and suffering.

Answer: René Magritte

Given the title and introduction of this quiz, I could hardly use the alternative title, 'This is Not a Pipe', could I. The Belgian artist René François Ghislain Magritte (1898-1967) was a leader of the Surrealist movement, who frequently placed familiar objects in an unfamiliar context so as to create new levels of meaning in the mind of the observer. 'The Treachery of Images' fits into this category. It shows a realistic image of a nice brown pipe (including a gold band and an ebony mouthpiece), under which appear the words "Ceci n'est pas une pipe." The point being made is that it is not a pipe, it is an image of a pipe. Art is not reality, it interprets reality. It was one of a series of works using the same idea, such as the apple labelled as not an apple.

'Le Jeu de Mourre', 1966 painting of an apple with the words "au revoir" written across it, was the inspiration for Paul McCartney's suggestion to use an apple as the logo for the company the Beatles were setting up - and Apple Records gained its name and its Granny Smith apple logo.

Answer: Jackson Pollock

Paul Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) was nicknamed 'Jack the Drip' because of the painting style he pioneered, in which the paint was literally dripped (and sometimes tossed) onto a canvas that had been laid on the floor. In an attempt to emphasise that it was the action of painting, not the representation of any object, that was important, Pollock chose for a time to give his paintings numbers rather than names. 'Number 11, 1952' was the eleventh painting he produced in 1952.

In 1954 the painting was displayed with the name 'Blue Poles', by which name it was known when controversially purchased by the National Gallery of Australia in 1974. The controversy was based both on the price (1.3 million dollars was a record price at the time) and on the fact that nobody could work out what it was supposed to be about. Debate over the purchase was one of the factors contributing to public dissatisfaction with the government of the time, and allegations that it was financial folly to make such a purchase helped create the atmosphere that led to the dismissal of the Whitlam government. Forty years later, the value of the painting was estimated to be between 100 million and 350 million dollars, representing an impressive increase in value.

Answer: Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol (1928-1987) was a leading figure in the Pop Art movement, which used images from popular culture as the starting point. Some members of the movement, such as Roy Lichtenstein, concentrated on using the art styles from comic books. Warhol found his own niche, exploring the relationship between celebrity, advertising, and works of art. 'Campbell's Soup Cans', a silkscreen painting, is actually constructed from 32 separate canvases, each one showing a can of one of the 32 different types of soup then marketed by the Campbell company. He painted a number of works using soup cans, but also used other iconic American images as the subject of his work: Coca Cola bottles, dollar bills, and celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley.

While Warhol created most of his work using silk screen painting, an intentional effort to produce a mechanised distance between the artist and the product, he also produced a number of what were referred to as "piss paintings". More formally called oxidation paintings, these were produced by covering a canvas with copper paint, then inducing an oxidation reaction which turned the copper green where the oxidising agent was applied. Warhol's chosen oxidising agent was urine, sometimes his own, more often supplied by guests at The Factory, his Manhattan studio. Over this copper-and-green background Warhol then created the images. 'Basquiat' (1982) is an example of this technique, in which a black silkscreen portrait of the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat is printed on an oxidised background.