Pop Art Trivia
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49 free Pop Art trivia questions with answers — pop culture quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Pop art took soup cans, comic strips and movie stars and hung them on museum walls, and it has never really left. This quiz runs from the London Independent Group of the 1950s, Eduardo Paolozzi's collages and Richard Hamilton's famous 1956 living room, to New York in the 1960s: Andy Warhol's 32 Campbell's Soup Cans at the Ferus Gallery, the Marilyn silkscreens, the Silver Factory, the Velvet Underground and the day Valerie Solanas shot Warhol; Roy Lichtenstein's Ben-Day dots, Whaam! and Drowning Girl; Claes Oldenburg's giant spoon, Jasper Johns's Flag, Robert Rauschenberg's Combines, James Rosenquist's F-111 and Tom Wesselmann's Great American Nude. It also covers what came around it and after: the Dada roots, the reaction against abstract expressionism, the museum shows that made pop official, Peter Blake and Sgt. Pepper, Keith Haring's subway chalk drawings, and pop art's cousins in France, Russia, Japan, Belgium and New Zealand. Easy questions ask who painted the soup cans and what Lichtenstein borrowed from; the expert tier asks for dates, galleries and record prices. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on pop art, the artists and the individual works, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question. If you like this, try our quizzes on Andy Warhol, modern art and famous paintings.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which two countries did pop art emerge in the mid-to-late 1950s?
The UK and the US
The UK and the US: British artists studied American consumer imagery from afar while New York became the hotbed almost simultaneously.
Q 02Which London circle, founded in 1952, is regarded as the precursor to pop art?
The Independent Group
The Independent Group met at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts from 1952 to argue over advertising, movies, comics and science fiction, bringing mass culture into debates about high culture.
Q 03Whose 1947 collage I was a Rich Man's Plaything is often called the first artwork to show the word 'Pop'?
Eduardo Paolozzi
Eduardo Paolozzi's collage shows the word 'Pop!' bursting from a gun's smoke cloud; he pasted it together from American magazine cuttings years before the movement had a name.
Q 04Which British critic is usually credited with coining the term 'pop art'?
Lawrence Alloway
Lawrence Alloway, the British critic behind the 1958 essay 'The Arts and the Mass Media', is usually credited with coining 'pop art', though he said he meant mass-media products, not art about them.
Q 05Who made the 1956 collage Just what is it that makes today's homes so different...?
Richard Hamilton
Richard Hamilton made the collage for the catalogue and poster of the 1956 This Is Tomorrow exhibition at London's Whitechapel Gallery; it is counted among the earliest pop works.
Q 06Which earlier movement's readymades and found images did pop art build on?
Dada
Pop swapped Dada's anarchic satire for a detached affirmation of mass culture.
Q 07Pop art is widely seen as a reaction against which dominant American movement?
Abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism's painterly looseness was what pop artists set out to defuse with impersonal, mundane reality and parody, though pop is also seen as an extension of it.
Q 08Whose December 1962 'Symposium on Pop Art' officially introduced the term?
The Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art staged its 'Symposium on Pop Art' in December 1962, moderated by curator Peter Selz, which gave the term official currency in America.
Q 09Which pop artist's LOVE design, first made for a Christmas card, became a US postage stamp in 1973?
Robert Indiana
Robert Indiana first sent LOVE to friends as a card in 1964; a New York museum put it on its 1965 Christmas card, and the eight-cent stamp proved so popular that hundreds of millions were printed.
Q 10Why did Warhol paint exactly 32 Campbell's Soup Cans?
One per flavour
One per flavour: Campbell's offered 32 varieties in 1962, and dealer Irving Blum lined the canvases up along a shelf like tins in a grocery.
Q 11Far from his New York base, in which city were Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans first exhibited in 1962?
Los Angeles
Los Angeles saw them first: Irving Blum showed the canvases at his Ferus Gallery in July 1962, Warhol's first solo pop show, and the artist did not even attend the opening.
Q 12Which future director of Easy Rider was among the first buyers of a Warhol soup can painting in 1962?
Dennis Hopper
Dennis Hopper reserved the tomato soup canvas before the show opened; dealer Irving Blum then talked him and the other early buyers into giving theirs up so the set could stay together.
Q 13Warhol began his Marilyn Monroe silkscreens within weeks of which 1962 event?
Her death
Q 21Warhol's best-known sculptures are silkscreened wooden replicas of the shipping cartons for which product?
Brillo soap pads
Brillo soap pads came 24 to a box, and Warhol's Brillo Boxes copied the carton, itself designed by commercial artist James Harvey, in silkscreen ink on wood.
Q 22Which New York landmark is the sole subject of Warhol's eight-hour silent film?
Empire State Building
The Empire State Building is the only star of Empire: Warhol shot six and a half hours of it one July night in 1964, then had the film projected slowly so that it runs just over eight.
Q 23In which city was Andy Warhol born, to Rusyn immigrant parents?
Pittsburgh
Her death in August 1962 set Warhol to work: within weeks he was silkscreening a publicity still from her 1953 film Niagara, repeating the face fifty times in the Marilyn Diptych.
Q 14What did Dorothy Podber do to a stack of Warhol's Marilyn canvases in 1964?
Fired a revolver through them
Fired a revolver through them: Podber asked if she could shoot the stack of four Marilyns, Warhol took her to mean with a camera, and the repaired canvases became famous as the Shot Marilyns.
Q 15How much did a Warhol Marilyn portrait fetch in 2022, then an auction record for an American artist?
$195 million
$195 million was the price at Christie's in New York in May 2022 for one of Warhol's 1964 Marilyns; the Zurich foundation that sold it puts the proceeds into health care and education for children.
Q 16What covered the walls of Warhol's first Factory studio on East 47th Street?
Silver paint and aluminium foil
Billy Name covered the walls in silver paint and aluminium foil in 1964, earning the East 47th Street studio the nickname the Silver Factory.
Q 17Who shot Andy Warhol at the Factory in June 1968?
Valerie Solanas
Valerie Solanas, author of the SCUM Manifesto, shot him on 3 June 1968, convinced he was plotting to steal her work after he lost a play script she had given him.
Q 18Which experimental rock band did Warhol manage and let rehearse at the Factory?
The Velvet Underground
The Velvet Underground's debut credits Warhol as producer, though he did little beyond paying for the sessions; he also designed its banana cover.
Q 19Warhol designed the cover of which 1971 Rolling Stones album?
Sticky Fingers
Warhol conceived the Sticky Fingers cover: a close-up of a jeans-clad crotch fitted with a real working zipper, with the package designed by Craig Braun.
Q 20Which magazine, nicknamed 'The Crystal Ball of Pop', did Andy Warhol co-found in 1969?
Interview
Interview began in 1969 as a film journal, founded by Warhol with British journalist John Wilcock; it became known for chatty celebrity interviews, often conducted by other celebrities.
Warhol was born in Pittsburgh in 1928 and studied at the city's Carnegie Institute of Technology before moving to New York in 1949.
Q 24With which younger artist did Warhol make more than 50 collaborative works in 1984–85?
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat worked on the same canvases in 1984–85, Warhol starting with a recognisable image and Basquiat painting over it; they showed the results at Tony Shafrazi's gallery in September 1985.
Q 25What operation did Warhol undergo the day before he died in February 1987?
Gallbladder surgery
Gallbladder surgery on February 21; his surgeon found the organ 'on the verge of perforating', and Warhol died the next day in New York Hospital.
Q 26What printing technique did Roy Lichtenstein painstakingly replicate by hand?
Ben-Day dots
Lichtenstein hand-painted Ben-Day dots, the uniform dot screens of cheap comic-book printing, enlarging and exaggerating them until the printing process itself became his subject.
Q 27In Lichtenstein's breakthrough comic painting Look Mickey, who thinks he has hooked a big fish?
Donald Duck
Donald Duck thinks he has landed a big one, unaware that his hook is caught in his own jacket; Lichtenstein took the scene from a children's storybook in 1961 and added the speech balloon himself.
Q 28Which London institution bought Lichtenstein's diptych Whaam! in 1966?
The Tate Gallery
The Tate Gallery bought Whaam! in 1966, three years after Lichtenstein painted the 1.7 by 4 metre diptych; the work passed to Tate Modern's collection.
Q 29What does the left panel of Whaam! show?
A fighter plane firing a rocket
The left panel shows a fighter plane firing a rocket; the right panel shows the target plane exploding in flames beneath the giant 'WHAAM!' lettering.
Q 30Lichtenstein's Whaam! was adapted from a 1962 war comic issued by which publisher?
DC Comics
DC Comics published the original, a panel drawn by Irv Novick for All-American Men of War; Lichtenstein split the single image across two canvases to make a diptych.