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50 free Pablo Picasso trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Pablo Picasso trivia quiz covers a 76-year career and the tangled life around it. It begins in Málaga with a father who painted pigeons and a toddler whose first word was a shortening of the Spanish for pencil, then follows him through A Coruña, Barcelona, the Madrid academy he stopped attending, the first freezing winter in Paris when he burned his work to keep warm, and the suicide that darkened the Blue Period. From there the questions move through the Rose Period harlequins, Gertrude Stein, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and the Trocadéro, Cubism with Braque, the collage that started Synthetic Cubism, the Mona Lisa arrest, the Ballets Russes and Olga Khokhlova, Marie-Thérèse Walter, Dora Maar and Guernica, the Gestapo officer who asked 'Did you do that?', the French Communist Party and the dove, Françoise Gilot, Jacqueline Roque, the Chicago sculpture named after an Afghan hound, the record-breaking auctions and the estate fight after he died without a will. Difficulty runs from easy to expert and is shown on every question. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question carries its citation. Try our Salvador Dalí and Renaissance Art quizzes next.
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Q 01In which Spanish city was Picasso born in 1881?
Málaga
His father José Ruiz y Blasco was a painter who specialised in naturalistic pictures of birds and game.
Q 02According to his mother, Picasso's first words were 'piz, piz', short for the Spanish word for what?
Pencil
He was drawing seriously from a very young age and took formal lessons from his father from seven.
Q 03The surname Picasso, his mother's, originally came from which region of Italy?
Liguria
His maternal great-grandfather Tommaso Picasso moved to Spain around 1807.
Q 04An apocryphal story says Picasso's father gave up painting after seeing his 13-year-old son finish a sketch of what?
A pigeon
The father specialised in birds; the story is told of their years in A Coruña.
Q 05How long did 13-year-old Picasso take on the Barcelona academy entrance exam that usually took a month?
A week
The family had moved to Barcelona after his seven-year-old sister Conchita died of diphtheria.
Q 06Which old master, known for elongated limbs and mystical faces, did Picasso admire in the Prado?
El Greco
He had been sent to the Real Academia de San Fernando at 16 but soon stopped attending classes.
Q 07In 1900 Picasso shared a tiny Paris room with poet Max Jacob. What was the arrangement?
Sleeping in shifts, one by day and one by night
They were so poor that much of Picasso's work was burned to keep the room warm.
Q 08Which magazine did Picasso found in Madrid in 1901 with his anarchist friend Francisco de Asís Soler?
Arte Joven
It ran for five issues; by the first, on 31 March 1901, he had started signing his work simply 'Picasso'.
Q 09Whose suicide helped set the sombre tone of Picasso's Blue Period?
His friend Carles Casagemas
He painted several posthumous portraits of Casagemas, culminating in the allegory La Vie (1903), now in Cleveland.
Q 10Which theme recurs in Blue Period works such as The Blindman's Meal and Celestina?
Blindness
The etching The Frugal Repast pairs a blind man and a sighted woman at a nearly bare table.
Q 11Which figure became Picasso's personal symbol during the Rose Period?
The harlequin
Circus performers, known in France as saltimbanques, fill the paintings of 1904 to 1906.
Q 12Who was Picasso's bohemian mistress from 1904, seen in many Rose Period paintings?
Fernande Olivier
He left her once he had some fame and money for Marcelle Humbert, known as Eva.
Q 13Which American writer became Picasso's principal patron and hosted the 1905 salon where he met Matisse?
Gertrude Stein
Her brother Leo, and the Cone sisters of Baltimore, also collected him; Matisse became a lifelong friend and rival.
Q 21Picasso's first wife, Olga Khokhlova, was a ballerina with which company?
Diaghilev's Ballets Russes
He was designing Erik Satie's ballet Parade in Rome; they married in 1918 and honeymooned near Biarritz.
Q 22Picasso's son Paulo grew up to be a motorcycle racer and what else?
Chauffeur to his father
He was the only legitimate child; Olga refused a divorce and they stayed married until her death in 1955.
Q 23Picasso and which composer collaborated on the ballet Pulcinella in 1920?
Igor Stravinsky
He made several drawings of the composer during the project.
Q 14Which German-born dealer, whose Paris gallery Picasso joined in 1907, championed Cubism from the start?
Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler
He also promoted Braque, Derain, Léger and Gris; his contract lapsed when he was exiled from France in the war.
Q 15Where had Picasso seen African artefacts before repainting two faces in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon?
The ethnographic museum at the Trocadéro
When friends saw the painting they were shocked; Matisse dismissed it as a hoax, and it was not shown publicly until 1916.
Q 16How did Matisse react when shown Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in 1907?
He angrily dismissed it as a hoax
The three left-hand figures were inspired by Iberian sculpture.
Q 17With which painter did Picasso develop Analytic Cubism?
Georges Braque
Both took objects apart in monochrome browns and greys; their paintings of the time are hard to tell apart.
Q 18In 1911 Picasso was arrested and questioned over the theft of which painting?
The Mona Lisa
Apollinaire had implicated him; fearing deportation, Picasso denied ever having met the poet. Both were cleared.
Q 19Still Life with Chair Caning (1912), often called the first Cubist collage, incorporates what material?
Printed oilcloth
It is oil and printed oilcloth on canvas edged with rope, and is also considered the first assemblage.
Q 20Picasso's mistress Eva Gouel, celebrated in many Cubist works, died in 1915 at what age?
30
He was devastated; he then had an affair with Gaby Lespinasse.
Q 24How old was Marie-Thérèse Walter when Picasso met her in 1927?
17
She became his 'golden muse' and the mother of his daughter Maya; he hid them in a flat across the street from his wife.
Q 25Which creature replaced Picasso's earlier circus symbol as a common motif in his work of the 1930s?
The minotaur
It came partly from the surrealists, who used it as a symbol, and appears in Guernica and the Vollard Suite.
Q 26Guernica depicts the bombing of a Basque town during which war?
The Spanish Civil War
German and Italian aircraft carried out the raid; the painting was shown at the Spanish Pavilion of the 1937 Paris Exposition.
Q 27Which photographer and lover of Picasso documented the painting of Guernica?
Dora Maar
Her black-and-white photographs are thought to have influenced the picture's monochrome scheme.
Q 28Where was Guernica kept until 1981, at Picasso's wish that it not go to Spain until democracy returned?
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
It hung at the Prado's Casón del Buen Retiro after its return and moved to the Reina Sofía in 1992.
Q 29When a Gestapo officer saw a photo of Guernica and asked 'Did you do that?', what did Picasso reply?
'No, you did'
He stayed in occupied Paris throughout the war, unable to exhibit, casting bronze with metal smuggled by the Resistance.
Q 30Between 1935 and 1959 Picasso wrote more than 300 of what?
Poems
Mostly untitled except for a date, they were erotic and sometimes scatological; he also wrote plays such as Desire Caught by the Tail.