Holiday Quiz

1

Which German artist said to the famous surgeon Sauerbruch: "Sauerbruch, if you make a mistake, the green lawn covers it. A mistake of mine is still hanging on the wall after a hundred years!"

Lovis Corinth

Max Liebermann

Franz von Stuck

Answer:

It was Max Liebermann. Prof. Sauerbruch was the director of the Berlin Charité and belonged to the circle of friends of the artist, who also painted him. Sauerbruch, however, was a poor model, for whom the portrait sessions took too long. Liebermann finally admonished him with these words that have become famous.

2

Heinrich von Kleist (1777 - 1811) commented on a painting by a German Romantic artist, which shows only a tiny figure contemplating a seascape, that its "uniformity and shorelessness make it seem as if one's eyelids had been cut away". Which painting by which artist is meant?

Answer:

'Monk by the Sea' (1808-1810, 110 x 171.5 cm, oil on canvas, Alte Nationalgalerie Berlin) by Caspar David Friedrich.

3

How many times was Pablo Picasso married?

Not once

Once

Twice

Answer:

esolution: Twice, with Olga Kokhlova and Jacqueline Roque.

4

Which famous film director, of the early 20th century chose as his pseudonym the name of a community in Germany that caused a furor as a meeting place for an avant-garde of artists?

Answer:

Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, also F.W. Murnau, born Dec. 28, 1888, as Wilhelm Plumpe in Bielefeld, died March 11, 1931, in Santa Barbara, Calif.

The picturesque Bavarian community of Murnau am Staffelsee, located in the foothills of the Alps, attracted many artists and intellectuals at the beginning of the 20th century. It is inextricably linked with names such as Wassily Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter, Alexej Jawlensky, Marianne von Werefkin, Franz Marc and became the cradle of the "Blauer Reiter," a loose association of artists.

5

Right or wrong??

There was an artist who was represented with a work in 1937 both in the "First Great German Art Exhibition", the opening exhibition of the newly built House of German Art in Munich and the so-called exhibition "Degenerate Art" in the Hofarkaden of the Residenz.

Answer: Correct!

Although the German sculptor Rudolf Belling was increasingly boycotted and defamed as "degenerate" already after the handover of power to the National Socialists in 1933, works by Belling were shown at the first Great German Art Exhibition in 1937, and at the same time at the Degenerate Art exhibition.

The fact that one and the same artist was supposed to be both exemplary and "degenerate" at the same time struck quite a few visitors. At first, the organizers tried to reinterpret the contradiction as a sign of their objectivity: It was only about the quality of artworks, not about persons. Later, the two sculptures were removed from the women's show; the portrait of the popular Schmeling was allowed to remain.

6

Which artist caused a furor because she shot at her paintings with a rifle?

Louise Bourgeois

Niki de St. Phalle

Marina Abramovic

Answer:

On February 12, 1961, Niki de Saint Phalle's first of twelve shooting events took place in the backyard of her Paris studio (until 1963). Invited artist friends shot at white plaster reliefs in which bubbles filled with paint were incorporated. The so-called "shooting pictures" (French: tirs) became first public actions and then ever larger happenings in the course of the 1960s. Her first solo exhibition in Paris was titled "Tirs à volonté." For two weeks, all visitors were allowed to shoot at the works on the wall (June 1961).

7

Which French artist of Classic Modernism dreamed of "an art of balance and purity that would have a "calming, balancing effect - comparable, for instance, to a good reclining chair." for every intellectual worker, businessman, or scientist"?

Answer:

Henri Matisse (1869 - 1954)

This remark characterizes in particular the artist's mature creative period, when Fauvism was gradually dissolving and Cubism was defining the avant-garde. Matisse's compositions are now emphatically related to the image as a two-dimensional surface.

8

Which Swiss artist became famous by moving "kinetic" sculptures

that function like machines but produce nothing of practical use?

Hint: He was married in second marriage to an equally famous artist.

Answer: Jean Tinguely (1925-1991), married in 2nd marriage to Niki de Saint Phalle.

Tinguely contributed with his movable and noisy, to the expansion of the traditional concept of art as well as a connection between art and life.

9

Which artist and black belt in judo jokingly called himself "...le monochrome" and also patented his favorite color?

Answer:

Yves Klein (1928-1962), was a co-founder and leading representative of the art movement called Nouveau Réalisme in France.

For Yves Klein, blue was not only the color of the sea and the sky, it also embodied "the indefinable and the infinity of space." Blue made possible "pure feeling and pure seeing" and stood "outside the dimensions of which the other colors are part." In the infinite blue expanses of sea and sky, Klein saw the freedom of a boundless space; from this he concluded that blue made possible the experience of an alien and profoundly human and universal sensibility.

10

Which of these famous artists did Franz von Stuck kick out of the Academy?

Otto Mueller

Claude Monet

Max Beckmann

Answer:

Otto Mueller, because he refused to have his work corrected by Franz von Stuck.

11

Which important British artist was a fighter pilot in World War II?

Henry Moore

Lynn Chadwick

Francis Bacon

Answer:

Lynn Chadwick (1914 – 2003)

12

What do the following artists have in common?

Emil Nolde

Georg Baselitz

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff

Answer:

All three artists chose their artist name after their birthplace/place of origin.

Emil Nolde - * August 7, 1867 as Hans Emil Hansen in Nolde, district of Tondern of the province of Schleswig-Holstein - † April 13, 1956 in Seebüll). On February 25, 1902 married to Ada (Adamine Frederikke) Vilstrup. In the course of the marriage he discarded the name Hansen and named himself after his birthplace Nolde.

Georg Baselitz - * January 23, 1938 in Deutschbaselitz, Saxony; birth name Hans-Georg Kern. In 1958 the artist moved from East to West Berlin. In 1961 he adopted the artist name Georg Baselitz, based on his birthplace.

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff - * December 1, 1884 as Karl Schmidt in Rottluff; † August 10, 1976 in Berlin; Karl Schmidt was born in the residential building of the mill in Rottluff near Chemnitz (Saxony) and called himself Schmidt-Rottluff from 1905.

13

Which Classic Modernist art movement provocatively declares that "a roaring car that seems to run on cartridges...is more beautiful than the Nike of Samothrace" and propagates a love of speed, danger, and aggression?

Answer: Italian Futurism

Futurism is considered one of the most controversial and ambivalent avant-garde movements. Even the founding manifesto of the poet Filippo Tomaso Marinetti (1909) proves this in its emphatically delivered slogans: they pay homage to modern technology, to the intoxication of speed. They despise the past and instead evoke a beauty that comes not from harmony but from aggression and struggle, triggers for an almost fanatical glorification of war.

14

When a critic saw an exhibition of completely new, intensely colored paintings at the Salon d'Automne in Paris in 1905, which made a mockery of every form of the familiar, and in the midst of which stood a conventional female sculpture, he exclaimed: "Donatello among wild beasts". From this arose the name for what art movement?

Answer:

Fauvism, which at the beginning of the 20th developed in various styles and moved away from the hitherto customary principles of painting such as perspective, the theory of proportion and the imitation of visible nature.

15

Which woman, who - as she herself writes - lived everything, not only shared the bed with her many dogs, but also with Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, Samuel Beckett and probably several famous artists more?

Hint: She had one of the most important galleries of the 20th century in New York and still has a museum in Europe.

Answer:

Peggy Guggenheim, born in 1898 into one of the richest industrialist families in the United States. Her great passion was collecting: Art, men and dogs were her disciplines.

16

Which artist, born 100 years ago, issued a multiple, which was produced as an 'empty' object from very simple material from 1968 to 1985 for initially 8,- DM approx. 12,000 times and what is the name of the object?

Answer: The Intuition Box by Joseph Beuys, who was born on May 12, 1921 and whose 100th birthday is being celebrated this year in numerous museums, is a simple spruce wood box. It is by far the most produced edition object of the artist and among the 557 multiples already the early work number 7.

17

Which 20th-century artist makes a highly amusing distinction between "making a living" and "painting on a Sunday" in his last cycle of over 100 works?

Answer:

Andy Warhol (1928 - 1987). Commissioned by his first gallerist and long-time friend, Alexandre Iolas, the artist created a gigantic cycle of works dealing with Leonardo da Vinci's "Last Supper" (1495-97) in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan.

As part of this, an Italian bank opened its new exhibition space in a venerable palazzo directly across the street from the church. For this exhibition, the artist did not select the versions he had painted by hand himself, but a total of only 22 of the versions converted into silkscreen. While the former are "Sunday painting", i.e. "leisure time fun", the latter serve to "earn a living". Quote Warhol: "During the week I have to earn money to live and for my fifty employees. That's why I put in so much time."

18

Which artist has always celebrated his birthday twice a year?

Jackson Pollock

Joan Miró

Alexander Calder

Answer:

It was Alexander Calder. According to his birth certificate, he was born on July 22, but his mother always claimed that this was a mistake by the authorities and Calder was born a month later, on August 22. Therefore Calder always celebrated his birthday on both days of the year.

19

Which artist did NOT put his paintings outdoors to let the weather "work" on them?

Sigmar Polke

Edvard Munch

Jörg Immendorff

Answer:

Only Polke and Munch used this technique.

20

Which artist performed the action called ‘How to explain the paintings to the dead hare’, in which he treated a dead rabbit, like a doll and led it through an exhibition .

Answer:

It was Joseph Beuys. It is less known, however, that Beuys is said to have prepared the animals from his actions himself afterwards. He was probably quite a good cook.

21

Who was the first living artist whose art was exhibited at the Louvre?

Edouard Manet

Georges Braque

Henri Matisse

Answer:

It was Georges Braque who was commissioned in 1953 to execute ceiling paintings in the Louvre.

22

Which artist did not use a gun for his suicide?

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Nicolas de Stael

Mark Rothko

Answer:

It was Nicolas de Stael: he jumped to his death from the 11th floor of the building where his studio was.

Kirchner shot himself,

Rothko took sleeping pills and cut his wrists.

23

In 2007, which artist gave the French village of Barjac, where he lived at the time, several large lead sculptures that were also placed in the middle of the village. However, after a short time they disappeared?

Answer:

It was Anselm Kiefer, one suspected at first professional art thieves however turned out that it had been the act of a scrap dealer, who had melted the lead immediately and had used it for the sealing of boats. He had no idea of the million-dollar value.