Square, Circle, Triangle Trivia Quiz

Answer: Piet Mondrian

Piet Mondrian, born in the Netherlands in 1872, painted at the turn of the 20th century, when modern art movements were flourishing. It helped that he moved to Paris at an early age, where the center of the art world congregated at the original home of the Salon. Among Mondrian's influences were pointillism, fauvism, and especially Cubism. That movement, most famous for its practitioner Pablo Picasso, heavily emphasized the use of simple geometric shapes like rectangles and triangles. Mondrian would take that idea to the extreme.

Forced to remain in the Netherlands during World War I, he was heavily influenced both by Bart van der Leck and Theo van Doesburg. Van der Leck's use of just primary colors (reds, yellows, and blues) was replicated in Mondrian's later work. With Van Doesburg, Mondrian began what began as the De Stijl art movement, which incorporated the theory of "neoplasticism." Neoplastic art uses straight, heavy black lines and vibrant primary colors, in an attempt to represent, abstractly, a complex world in simplified forms.

Post-World War II Paris was the site of many of Mondrian's major works, but he moved to first London, and then New York City in 1938 to avoid Nazi takeover. There, he created perhaps his best-known work, "Broadway Boogie Woogie," which imitates the city's grid layout and its bright lights with brilliant yellow rectangles.

Answer: Jackson Pollock

Abstract expressionism is designed to evoke emotions while still imitating the unnatural depictions of modern art schools. Jackson Pollock possibly defines the school better than any other artist. Suffering from alcoholism from an early age, Pollock was mentally unstable for a good portion of his life, yet his unique art only initiated after his October 1945 marriage. The bride, fellow painter Lee Krasner, was a major influence on Pollock's development and his subsequent technique.

Pouring and dripping paint onto the canvas, Pollock gained a certain notoriety with art critics, who both extolled and trashed the idea. Supporters called the art "action painting"; detractors gave him the moniker "Jack the Dripper," which stuck. There's no denying Pollock's success, though. He began to number his paintings, rather than give them inspired names, and later in his life, the bright colors began to subside into darker tones. "No. 5, 1948" set a record for the highest price ever paid for a painting, when it was sold to an undisclosed buyer in 2006.

In 1956, after a long hiatus from painting, Pollock died in an alcohol-related car accident. He was just 44.

Answer: Constantin Brancusi

Constantin Brancusi grew up in a village in Romania, the son of peasants, where he quickly developed a talent for woodcarving. He climbed the art world, moving to Paris, and eventually developing a style of sculpture that differed heavily from that of his mentor, Auguste Rodin. Brancusi tried to depict the symbolic essence of his subjects, rather than their physical forms; thus, in his major work "The Kiss," two pieces of stone are linked by arm-like projections, representing a gesture of passion. Brancusi scandalized the art world by entering his sculpture "Madame X" at the Paris Salon, but his influence would be later felt around the world.

Brancusi's best-known work, "Bird in Space," is a series of marble and bronze sculptures depicting the essence of a bird in flight. Excess lines have been trimmed down, so what remains is a tall, contorted sheet of metal or stone. When it was brought into the US in 1926, customs officials didn't agree with its classification as "art" and charged a tariff on the metal used to create the work. In a trial the following year, the customs definition of "art" was doctored to fit more modern conceptions. In 1938, Brancusi completed a World War I monument in Romania, including such notable works as the "Table of Silence" and the "Endless Column." The column is twisted and braided as it ascends into the sky, betraying the eyes to suggest that it actually does run forever.

Answer: Colors of the Rainbow

Francisco Goya, the acclaimed nineteenth-century Spanish painter, made a series called the "Black Paintings", which depicted monsters and depressing images. Mark Rothko, a modern artist, borrowed the idea of "black paintings" for his "black on black" series. Of what does that consist? Black rectangles on a black canvas. You have to look closely to even see the rectangles. The entire series is held at the Washington DC National Gallery of Art.

Rothko, a Jewish Russian born in 1903, moved with his family to the United States in 1913 to avoid pogroms and war. He took up painting in 1923 while living in New York City, where he was influenced by the modern artists of his day, but he only developed his personal style around the time of the Second World War. In 1946, Rothko first created his "multiform" paintings. These works, with blurry colors and no humanoid figures in sight, would later develop into the colorful rectangles of his heyday. The mixture of different colors, as well as compounds and textures used for the painting, defined his work.

In one notable incident, Rothko was hired to design murals for the Four Seasons restaurant in the upscale Seagram Building on Park Avenue. Rothko had a major temper tantrum and allegedly disclosed that he tired such of the project that he wished to ruin the appetites of those eating in the restaurant. Alas, his "hideous" canvases were so desired that, unexpectedly, he ended the project early and refused to use his paintings for the dining room. In 1970, Rothko committed suicide after being diagnosed with an aortic aneurysm two years earlier. A play about his life, "Red," won six Tonys, including "Best Play," in 2010.

Answer: Pop art

One guiding principle behind pop art was that mass-producing images counts as fine art, even when the images are of everyday materials or figures in popular culture. Dadaism, the anti-art cultural movement in Europe earlier in the century, would have a great influence on the pop artists. The term was first used by John McHale in 1954, although the earlier pop artists (Johns, Robert Rauschenberg) are often distinguished from the later, true pop artists (like Andy Warhol), who worked during the '60s.

The most notable pop artists were American. Robert Rauschenberg coined the term "combine" for his strange sculptures including everyday objects. Jasper Johns painted flags and targets almost exclusively. Roy Liechtenstein is well-known for using Ben-Day dots to make comic-book style illustrations like "Whaam!" and "Drowning Girl." Claes Oldenburg, a notable Swede on the list, made "soft sculptures" of everyday objects; for example, a tube of lipstick that deflates unless a passerby refills it with air. Of course, the far-and-away most famous pop artist was Andy Warhol, who created images of Campbell's soup, Marilyn Monroe, and other items from pop culture. Warhol also satired the art world in his own works. In one notable example, he prepared canvases with copper paint, and then instructed others to urinate on the copper. An oxidation reaction that followed changed the copper's color to green. I guess the painting was then deemed, "organic."

Answer: Fauvism

Matisse, a Frenchman born in 1869, began in the era of fuzzy-but-recognizable Impressionist and post-Impressionist works, and his early works bear far more realism than what followed. Gradually shifting toward more vivid colors, straight lines, and emotional depictions, Matisse and his friends made a major exposition at the Salon d'Atomne in 1905, and critics declaimed their works. One disgruntled critic called a Renaissance sculpture placed in the same room as the new artwork to be as a "Donatello among the beasts." The French word for "beasts," "fauves," stuck, and the new movement was called Fauvism.

Matisse's partner in Fauvism was Andre Derain, and gradually the two began producing works that became more and more abstract. Although the early Fauvist works at least depicted humans to some degree of accuracy, those that followed were less recognizable. Probably Matisse's best known work is "The Dance," which portrays five bright red human-esque figures dancing in a circle. The bright colors emphasize the spirit and tempo of the characters' actions.

Answer: Mobiles

Alexander Calder is perhaps best-known today for his invention of the mobile, a contraption that is now seen as commonplace, but he led other developments in modern sculpture as well. Take, for instance, his "Mercury Fountain." The fountain was designed to protest the Republican Spanish government during the Spanish Civil War; unveiled at the 1937 World Exposition in Paris, it serves a similar role to Picasso's "Guernica." Of course, mercury being toxic and all, the fountain is currently kept behind glass, since the mercury is liable to leap out at unsuspecting tourists.

Calder invented the mobile, for kinetic sculpture, but he's also known for creating nonmoving sculptures called stabiles. For example, he created a vividly red sculpture entitled "Flamingo" that inhabits the Federal Plaza in Chicago, a tone that is sometimes called "Calder red." After his death in 1977, Calder was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Gerald Ford.

Answer: Marcel Duchamp

If there was one artist who truly blurred the distinction between art and minutiae, it would be Marcel Duchamp, a Dadaist and Surrealist born in 1887. Both art movements were considered radical for their days. Dadaism, an anti-war and anarchical genre of arts and poetry, flourished in Europe after World War I. Surrealism was established by Spaniard Salvador Dali and Frenchman Andre Breton around the same time.

Duchamp challenged traditional conventions by labeling, for the first time, "art" where it had previously never existed. For example, his readymades were manufactured objects that he slightly doctored and signed as his own. Probably the best-known of these works is "Fountain," a public urinal that Duchamp signed as "R. Mutt" and presented to the 1917 exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists. Other readymades by Duchamp include a wine rack, a snow shovel, a bicycle wheel, and a typewriter cover.

Duchamp gained public notoriety for other eccentricities too. He drew a mustache on a "Mona Lisa" postcard, added on a coarse French pun for a title, and called it art. Possibly his best-known painting, "Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2," caused a huge riff when it was unveiled at the Armory Show in 1913. President Theodore Roosevelt even mocked the painting, contrasting it with a normal, aesthetically-pleasing Navajo rug in his bathroom.

Answer: Wrapping them with fabric

Christo Vladimirov Javacheff was born in Bulgaria in 1935, while his wife, Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon was Moroccan. Tragically, Jeanne-Claude died in 2009 from a brain aneurysm; in her will, she asked that her body be used for science.

The couple met in 1958 and began their first project together in 1961, covering barrels with cloth in Cologne, Germany. Their projects grew in scale. One of their earlier successes involved the "wrapping" of Little Bay in Sydney, Australia, with 56 kilometers (about 35 miles) of rope and shocking amount of colorful cloth. The "wrap," when complete, utilized over 100 laborers and covered an expanse of about 1.5 miles.

Among Christo and Jeanne-Claude's other project are the Reichstag wrap in 1995 and the Gates, in New York City's Central Park. The Gates consists of more than 7500 pieces of bright orange-yellow cloth placed along the park's paths, for 37 kilometers (about 20 miles). The project, originally planned in 1979, was only begun in 2005 because it necessitated approval from the city's mayor; Michael Bloomberg finally gave the OK 26 years after its original proposal. The proceeds of the project were given to charity.

Answer: Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Kandinsky might be the most important artist you've never heard of. Although his paintings are significant, his contributions to art theory are probably the greatest result of his studies. In works like "Point and Line to Plane" and "Concerning the Spiritual in Art," he saw the artist's role as a spiritual pursuit, rather than a logical one. Earlier artists principally concentrated on depicting historical events or natural scenes with some degree of realism. Kandinsky, on the other hand, believed that the emotions in a canvas may be as or more important than its actual content. For example, he noted that yellow can be violent, while blue is calming-and that the artist must work those emotions.

Kandinsky's work epitomizes abstraction. His generically numbered Compositions are geometrically filled with basic shapes and bright colors, but they bear little resemblance to any real-life person or object. One of his only recognizable works, "Der Blaue Reiter" ("The Blue Rider") depicts a man in blue crossing a green field. The very blurry setting seems to associate speed and urgency with the setting better than any realistic depiction. "The Blue Rider" actually inspired an expressionist art movement of the same name immediately before World War I.