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50 free Salvador Dalí trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Salvador Dalí trivia quiz covers the painter, the showman and the strange life in between. It starts in Figueres with the older brother whose name he inherited, the notary father who threw him out of the house, the Madrid student residence he shared with Lorca and Buñuel, the Sunday mornings in the Prado and the expulsion from the academy before his final exams. From there it takes in Un Chien Andalou, the arrival of Gala, The Persistence of Memory and its Camembert origins, the Surrealist 'trial', the London lecture delivered in a diving helmet, the Lobster Telephone and Mae West sofa, the meeting with Freud, the Time cover, the 'Avida Dollars' anagram, the escape from France in 1940, Spellbound and Destino, Nuclear Mysticism, the rhinoceros horn, the Chupa Chups logo, Franco, the castle at Púbol, the fire, the pacemaker, the crypt beneath his own museum and the 2017 exhumation. 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 Pablo Picasso and Coco Chanel quizzes next.
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Q 01In which Catalan town was Salvador Dalí born in 1904?
Figueres
He is buried there too, in a crypt beneath the stage of his own Theatre-Museum, 450 metres from the house where he was born.
Q 02Dalí was named after his older brother, who had died nine months before his birth of what?
Gastroenteritis
He was haunted by the idea all his life, calling the boy 'probably the first version of myself but conceived too much in the absolute'.
Q 03What was the profession of Dalí's strict father?
Lawyer and notary
He was an anti-clerical atheist and Catalan federalist; Dalí's mother tempered his discipline and encouraged her son's art.
Q 04Two of Dalí's childhood football companions in Cadaqués went on to play for which club?
FC Barcelona
Emili Sagi-Barba and Josep Samitier both went on to top-flight careers.
Q 05After Dalí's mother died of uterine cancer in 1921, whom did his father marry?
Her sister
Dalí called his mother's death 'the greatest blow I had experienced in my life' but did not resent the marriage, loving his aunt.
Q 06At the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, Dalí became close friends with Luis Buñuel and which poet?
Federico García Lorca
Dalí said he rejected the poet's advances; when Lorca was executed in 1936, Dalí claimed his response was to shout 'Olé!'.
Q 07Which Madrid museum did the student Dalí visit every Sunday, calling it the world's best museum of old paintings?
The Prado
He described it as the start of a 'monk-like period' of solitary study.
Q 08Why did Dalí's Cubist-style student paintings draw so much attention from his classmates in the capital?
Nobody else in the city was painting that way at the time
His uncle Anselm, a bookseller, had supplied him with magazines on Cubism; Cabaret Scene (1922) is a typical example.
Q 09Dalí left the Royal Academy of San Fernando in 1926 at what point?
Shortly before his final exams
His realistic The Basket of Bread, painted the same year, showed how little he needed the diploma.
Q 10On his first trip to Paris in April 1926, Dalí met which artist he revered?
Pablo Picasso
Joan Miró had already put in a good word; decades later Picasso refused to speak Dalí's name because of his support for Franco.
Q 11Dalí's flamboyant later moustache was modelled on that of which 17th-century painter?
Diego Velázquez
He grew a neatly trimmed version in the mid-1920s before letting it become an icon.
Q 12Dalí's main contribution to Un Chien Andalou (1929) was what?
Helping Buñuel write the script
He later claimed a big role in the filming, which contemporary accounts do not support; the film opens with an eyeball sliced by a razor.
Q 13When Dalí met Gala in 1929 she was married to which Surrealist poet?
Paul Éluard
Born Elena Ivanovna Diakonova, the Russian émigrée was ten years his senior and became his muse, wife and business manager.
Q 21Dalí delivered his lecture at the 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition wearing what?
A deep-sea diving suit and helmet
He arrived with a billiard cue and two Russian wolfhounds and had to have the helmet unscrewed as he gasped for air.
Q 22Dalí was featured on the cover of Time magazine on 14 December 1936 at what age?
32
Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) was drawing crowds at MoMA and the Julien Levy Gallery.
Q 23Which English patron commissioned the Mae West Lips Sofa and a famous crustacean-shaped telephone?
Edward James
Q 14What provoked Dalí's father to throw him out of the family home in December 1929?
A drawing of the Sacred Heart inscribed with an insult to his mother
The inscription read 'Sometimes, I spit for fun on my mother's portrait'; Dalí refused to recant and was disinherited.
Q 15After the break with his father, Dalí and Gala rented and then bought a fisherman's cabin where?
Port Lligat
He gradually bought the neighbouring cabins to build his villa by the sea, later adding a glass floor to study foreshortening.
Q 16Dalí said the melting watches in The Persistence of Memory came to him while contemplating what?
Camembert cheese
The soft watches are usually read as a rejection of rigid, deterministic time, echoing Einstein.
Q 17In The Persistence of Memory, one of the limp watches is being devoured by what?
Ants
Ants recur throughout his work as symbols of death, decay and desire.
Q 18Where did Dalí first say 'The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad'?
During lectures at MoMA on his 1934 US visit
His second New York show at Julien Levy's gallery was a hit that same visit.
Q 19Heiress Caresse Crosby, who threw Dalí a farewell ball in 1935, is credited with inventing what?
The brassiere
Dalí wore a glass case containing a brassiere on his chest; Gala dressed as a woman giving birth through her head.
Q 20Dalí's response to the 1934 'trial' that nearly saw him expelled from Breton's group was what quip?
'The difference between the Surrealists and me is that I am a Surrealist'
He narrowly avoided expulsion after refusing to denounce fascism explicitly.
James bought four of the working phones for his home; he supported Dalí financially for two years from 1936.
Q 24Dalí's 1938 meeting with Sigmund Freud was arranged thanks to which writer?
Stefan Zweig
As Dalí sketched him Freud whispered 'That boy looks like a fanatic', and told Zweig the Spaniard had changed his estimate of the Surrealists.
Q 25Dalí spent autumn 1938 painting at 'La Pausa', the Riviera home of which fashion designer?
Coco Chanel
The resulting New York show was reportedly the most popular since Whistler's Mother visited in 1934.
Q 26Dalí's Dream of Venus pavilion at the 1939 World's Fair featured nude models dressed in what?
Fresh seafood
He raged that the organisers thought 'a woman with the tail of a fish is possible; a woman with the head of a fish impossible'.
Q 27André Breton's 1949 nickname for Dalí, 'Avida Dollars', is what?
An anagram of Salvador Dalí
It mocked the commercialisation of his work after his 1939 expulsion from the Surrealist group.
Q 28Who issued the Dalís visas in June 1940 that let them escape occupied France?
Aristides de Sousa Mendes, the Portuguese consul in Bordeaux
They sailed from Lisbon to New York on the Excambion and stayed in the US for eight years.
Q 29Which writer published a scathing review of Dalí's 1942 autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí?
George Orwell
Time had called it 'one of the most irresistible books of the year'.
Q 30Dalí designed the dream sequence for which 1945 Alfred Hitchcock film?
Spellbound
Neither he nor Hitchcock was satisfied with the result.