Take a Bow Trivia Quiz

Answer: Greece

Venus is the Roman goddess of love and beauty; however, the statue is probably more correctly called Aphrodite of Milos since it is Greek in origin. Aphrodite is the Greek equivalent of Venus. The statue, made from marble, dates from around 100 BC and was discovered in 1820 on the Greek island of Milos.

The French won the competition to acquire the statue and it was eventually placed in the Louvre museum in Paris. An inscription from the statue's plinth indicated that Alexandros of Antioch was the artist. The experts at the time had already pronounced it to be the work of the 4th century BC sculptor Praxiteles and so dismissed the plinth and the remnants of the left arm and hand as later additions. These were then ... er ... lost.

Answer: L S Lowry

Lowry lived and worked for many years around Pendlebury, a former coal-mining and cotton-mill town near Manchester. He never married and died in 1976 at the age of 88. According to 'The Guardian' newspaper, more than 250 people have refused honours from Queen Elizabeth II and Lowry has the distinction of refusing five of them, including a knighthood.

The theatre and gallery complex in Salford known as The Lowry was opened in 2000. It houses a collection of around 400 of his works. Many of his 'matchstick' paintings are based on scenes around Salford and nearby Pendlebury. During the 2000s some of his paintings were selling for several million dollars. I had always thought the song in the question was about matchstick men (rather than matchstalk), but apparently it was not. As of 2013, the song has been the only UK chart entry for duo Brian and Michael.

Answer: Constable

John Constable (1776-1837) was a Romantic-era painter known for his landscape paintings. Born to a wealthy corn merchant, he was expected to carry on the family business however he preferred art. Not financially successful, his paintings sold better in France than his home country. He married in 1816, was widowed in 1828 and then raised the seven children of his marriage by himself.

Initially much better received in France than England, the "Hay Wain" was one of the Constable works that inspired the Barbizon school of painters in France. The Barbizon school, taking its name from the French village where many of the artists gathered, were influential in the move away from Romanticism towards Realism through landscape painting.

Answer: Central America

Henry Moore (1898-1986) was born the son of a coal miner and became extremely wealthy in later life as a result of his sculpting. After surviving the First World War, he used an ex-serviceman's grant to enrol at Leeds School of Art. Scholarships followed, including one in 1924 which took him on a six-month trip to Italy.

It was during this period that he saw a plaster cast of the chacmool (or chac mool) in Paris which was to have such an influence on his sculpting. The Totlec and Maya, believed responsible for the chacmool, were pre-Columbian Mesoamerican peoples.

The photo shows a chacmool at Chichén Itzá in Mexico.

Answer: France

If you've read 'The Shelters of Stone', fifth in a prehistoric fiction series by Jean M Auel, you can deduce that Ayla was the first to discover the cave at Lascaux and that the Zelandonii were first to paint it. The paintings, rediscovered in 1940, date from the Upper Palaeolithic era.

Damage to the paintings caused by carbon dioxide from visitors led to the cave being closed in 1963. A replica cave, containing two of the cave halls and their paintings, was set up in 1983 for visitors. Following the introduction of an air conditioning system, the original cave has been beset by fungal problems.

Answer: Austria

The photo shows one form of the Austrian coat of arms, with a stylised Austrian flag on the eagle's chest.

Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) was a leading light in the Vienna Secession, a group which objected to the conservatism of the local art establishment at the time. His main painting focus was the female form. The 'Golden Period' was when he painted in a gilded style, using oil paint and layers of gold leaf. Although he never married, he had at least 14 children to his name.

Adele Bloch-Bauer, the model in the painting, was married to a wealthy sugar merchant, who commissioned Klimt to do two portraits of her. She thus had the distinction of being the only model to be painted twice by him. The painting was confiscated during the Second World War and, after lengthy court cases in the US and Austria, ownership was re-established in 2006. It was then bought by an American billionaire for the reported sum of $135 million, a record price for any painting at the time.

Answer: Claude Monet

The picture was part of an exhibition in 1874 which attracted a satirical review from a critic. His article made liberal use of the word 'impression', borrowing it from the painting's title and, in the process, inadvertently named one of the most influential of all the art movements. Those artists listed as answers were prominent members of the French Impressionist movement.

Claude Monet (1840-1926) was a founding member of the Impressionist movement. In later life he suffered from cataracts, with some paintings at the time having a general reddish hue. He then had two cataract operations which changed his colour perception, with him repainting some of these with bluer water lilies.

Answer: Woodblock

Woodblock printing is a technique which originated in China and was used for printing books and images for centuries. A relief pattern is carved in a block of wood which can then be "inked" to produce the print, a mirror-image of the carved block. Coloured prints used multiple blocks, one for each colour, to produce the complete image.

Producing a woodblock was normally a team-effort involving the publisher, artist, wood engravers and printers. One set of blocks might be used to produce several thousand prints before replacement blocks were required. Normally only the artist and publisher were credited on the finished product.

Answer: Pop

All are forms of art, however it is pop art with which Andy Warhol was associated. The online Oxford Dictionaries defines it as: "art based on modern popular culture and the mass media, especially as a critical or ironic comment on traditional fine art values." It had its beginnings in the UK during the early 1950s with the spark provided by the Independent Group, formed in London during 1952 from painters, sculptors, writers and the like.

The American version took off in the 1960s. Andy Warhol's first "soup can" work was the 1962 montage of 32 canvases, one for each variety of Campbell's Soup offered at the time.

Answer: Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali (1904-1989) was a Spanish surrealist painter and known for his eccentric attention-seeking behaviour. One of his most famous works is the surrealist painting "The Persistence of Memory" (1931), which features several melting watches. He returned to the theme of melting watches later in life using lithography and sculptures as his medium.