Art rounds are written by people who are not art historians, which is what
makes them learnable. The questions are about attribution, location and
notoriety: who painted it, where is it now, and what happened to it.
Attribution and location
A small canon supplies most questions —
the Mona Lisa,
the Great Wave,
Guernica,
the David,
the Thinker,
the Scream,
the Sistine ceiling,
the Night Watch. For each,
setters ask the artist, the gallery, and increasingly the incident.
Galleries are worth learning as a list in their own right: which city, which
country, and the one or two works each is known for. "In which gallery would you
find X" is one of the most common art questions there is.
Movements, and the stories
Movements are asked shallowly — name the movement from a description, or the
artist from the movement. Impressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, Dada, Pop Art and
the Pre-Raphaelites cover nearly all of it, and
Impressionism was named as an
insult, which is a question in itself.
Thefts, forgeries and disasters are the hardest and most-asked end:
the Gardner Museum heist,
the Vermeer forger who confessed to save
himself,
the Banksy that shredded itself,
the botched restoration, and
the Elgin Marbles. These produce
better questions than the paintings do, and setters know it.
Who painted the Mona Lisa, and where does it hang?
Answer Leonardo da Vinci — the Louvre, Paris
Who painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling?
Answer Michelangelo (1508–1512)
Who composed The Magic Flute and over 600 works, dying at 35?
Answer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Who painted The Starry Night?
Answer Vincent van Gogh
Who painted Guernica?
Answer Pablo Picasso (1937)
The Rijksmuseum, home of Rembrandt's Night Watch, is in which city?
Answer Amsterdam
The Smithsonian Institution — the world's largest museum complex — is centred on which city?
Answer Washington, D.C.
Who painted The Persistence of Memory (melting clocks)?
Answer Salvador Dalí
Angkor Wat is in which country?
Answer Cambodia
Petra ('the Rose City') is in which country?
Answer Jordan
Christ the Redeemer overlooks which city?
Answer Rio de Janeiro (completed 1931)
The Parthenon sits on which hill?
Answer The Acropolis, Athens (dedicated to Athena)
Who painted Campbell's soup cans and ran a New York studio called the Factory?
Answer Andy Warhol
Who sculpted "The Thinker" and "The Kiss"?
Answer Auguste Rodin
The Prado — Las Meninas, Goya's black paintings — is in which city?
Answer Madrid
Who composed the Ninth Symphony ('Ode to Joy') while deaf?
Answer Ludwig van Beethoven
Who painted "The Night Watch"?
Answer Rembrandt van Rijn
Which architect designed Fallingwater and New York's spiralling Guggenheim?
Answer Frank Lloyd Wright
The Uffizi Gallery — Botticelli's Birth of Venus — is in which city?
Answer Florence
Who painted The Scream?
Answer Edvard Munch
Which sculptor made the first free-standing nude bronze since antiquity, a "David" in Florence?
Answer Donatello
Who designed the Louvre's glass pyramid (1989)?
Answer I. M. Pei
The National Gallery stands on which London square?
Answer Trafalgar Square
Golden Gate Bridge opened?
Answer 1937 (San Francisco)
Who painted "The Third of May 1808" and the "Black Paintings"?
Answer Francisco Goya
Which painter returned again and again to Mont Sainte-Victoire and is called the father of modern art?
Answer Paul Cézanne
Machu Picchu was built by which civilisation?
Answer The Inca (Peru)
Who composed the ballets Swan Lake and The Nutcracker?
Answer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Who painted "Liberty Leading the People"?
Answer Eugène Delacroix
Which Dublin-born painter made screaming popes and distorted triptychs?
Answer Francis Bacon