Styles of Art Trivia Quiz

Answer: Impressionism

Claude Monet painted a picture called 'Impression Sunrise' which was mocked by the critics because it was not a clear precise picture, but loose brush strokes giving the impression of a sunrise. The group of artists who painted this way took up the name and called themselves the 'Impressionists'.

These included Renoir, Pissarro and Sisley, who painted mostly in the open air so that their work conveyed the feeling of the scene and not just its appearance.

Answer: Pre-Raphaelite

The Pre-Raphaelites were a group of British Artists founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. They were joined by several other artists, and were against the style promoted by the Royal Academy at the time and were influenced by the art before the time of Raphael. They liked to paint beautiful women in a medieval style.

Answer: Abstract

Piet Mondrian was a Dutch Painter who lived from 1872 to 1944. He began as a figurative landscape painter, but his work simplified more and more until it was just blocks of colour. This is considered abstract art because it does not depict a person, place, or thing in the natural world.

The subject of the work is what you see: color, shapes, brushstrokes, etc. Mondrian was considered by Hitler as a degenerate artist, and fled first to Britain, where he survived the London Blitz, and then to the U.S.A.

Answer: Romanticism

Goya was the leading Spanish painter during the latter half of the 18th century. He was court painter to three different Spanish Kings. Romanticism was a renewed interest in the thoughts and feelings of people in the pictures, rather than just what they looked like. Later in life he painted a series of pictures, which became known as 'The Black Paintings', which were concerned with insanity and death. Goya painted them on the walls of his house, but they were later removed and are now displayed in the Prado Museum in Madrid.

Answer: Flemish Baroque

Peter Paul Reubens is considered the greatest of the Flemish Baroque painters, and as such his paintings are full of vitality, sensuous and dynamic. Although he did paint landscapes and portraits, Reubens is most remembered for his work on religious subjects.

Answer: Surrealism

Rene Magritte was a Belgian surrealist painter. The surrealists sought to uncover the contents of the unconscious mind, and often showed familiar objects out of their normal context. Magritte's work is witty and fun, and meant to provoke thought in the viewer, and challenge his preconceptions. His style has influenced both pop art and conceptual arts.

Answer: Cubism

Cubism is a style of painting pioneered by Picasso and Braque, in which the painter is attempting to show the same object or person from different directions at once to give a fuller picture of what it is like. Picasso and Braque are the main exponents.

Answer: Fauvism

Andre Derain and Henri Matisse started the fauve movement in 1904. It was a style of painting where strong colours and wild brush strokes were more important than the form or content of the work. They were called 'Les Fauves' because the critic Louis Vauxcelles called them this, which meant 'wild beasts', because he found their work so undisciplined.

Answer: Expressionism

Expressionism is a name for the kind of painting where emotions just fly off the canvas. Edvard Munch was the Norwegian artist who created the well known picture 'The Scream'. This image has been taken to represent man's anxiety in the modern world.

It was originally titled in German by Munch 'Der Schrei der Natur' ('The Scream of Nature'). This is an extreme example of an expressionist picture.

Answer: Pointilism

Pointillism is a technique related to impressionism in which the picture is composed of small dots of colour. Georges Seurat and Paul Signac developed the technique in 1886, and the name pointillism was originally given in mockery, but now such connotations have disappeared. From close up the pictures look like a confusing mess, but from further off the dots merge and the impression is of a shimmering image.