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60 free Surrealism trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This surrealism trivia quiz covers the movement that set out, in André Breton's words, to resolve dream and reality into a super-reality. It begins with the origins: Apollinaire's coinage, Dada, Freud, automatic writing, the 1924 manifesto and the rival who lost the name, the exquisite corpse game and de Chirico's empty arcades. Then it turns to the artists everyone knows and the details they may not: why Dalí's watches melt, what he wore to lecture in London, who Gala was, and what Breton's nickname 'Avida Dollars' really is; Magritte's pipe, apple, veiled lovers and wartime forgeries; Ernst's frottage and Loplop; Miró, Man Ray and Meret Oppenheim's fur teacup. There are questions on the films (the razor and the eye, the pianos full of donkeys, the L'Age d'Or riot, Hitchcock's Spellbound), on the women of the movement (Carrington, Tanning, Varo, Kahlo and the ribbon around a bomb) and on the politics and exhibitions that carried Surrealism from Paris to New York and Mexico. About a third of the questions are easy; the rest reward anyone who has spent time in MoMA or the Pompidou. Try our Salvador Dalí and modern art quizzes next. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Surrealism, its artists and their works, and each explanation adds one more detail.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who coined the word 'surrealism' in 1917?
Guillaume Apollinaire
He used it in his programme notes for the Ballets Russes production Parade, with music by Erik Satie.
Q 02Which earlier movement, born of disgust at World War I, most directly influenced Surrealism?
Dada
Many future Surrealists took part in Dada's anti-art gatherings in Paris after the war.
Q 03Who wrote the Surrealist Manifesto of October 1924 and led the movement for four decades?
André Breton
A rival, Yvan Goll, had published his own surrealist manifesto two weeks earlier but lost the battle for the name.
Q 04Breton's 1924 manifesto defined surrealism as pure what?
Psychic automatism
The aim was to express 'the actual functioning of thought' free of reason's control.
Q 05Before founding Surrealism, the movement's leader had trained in what field?
Medicine and psychiatry
He used Freud's methods on shell-shocked soldiers in a wartime neurological hospital.
Q 06Which thinker's ideas about the unconscious underpinned Surrealism?
Sigmund Freud
Breton had used his psychoanalytic techniques during the war.
Q 07What was The Magnetic Fields (1920), the earliest work produced by Breton's circle?
A text of automatic writing
Breton called it the first work written and published by his group.
Q 08Whose line about a sewing machine and an umbrella meeting on a dissecting table became a Surrealist touchstone?
Comte de Lautréamont
Breton called his Les Chants de Maldoror the first Surrealist work.
Q 09What was the name of the journal launched in 1924 by the Bureau of Surrealist Research?
La Révolution surréaliste
Littérature was Breton's earlier Dada-era magazine; Documents was Georges Bataille's dissident rival.
Q 10The Surrealist game 'exquisite corpse' takes its name from a sentence that ended with what?
...shall drink the new wine
Players write or draw in turn, folding the paper so nobody sees the earlier parts.
Q 11Which artist's 'metaphysical' paintings of arcades, long shadows and mannequins influenced the Surrealists?
Giorgio de Chirico
Magritte said seeing his The Song of Love was the first time 'my eyes saw thought'.
Q 12Yves Tanguy decided to become a painter after seeing which de Chirico painting from a bus?
The Child's Brain
He had no formal training and had served in the merchant navy.
Q 13In which Catalan town was Salvador Dalí born in 1904?
Figueres
His Theatre-Museum stands there today.
Q 21Which lollipop company's logo did Dalí design in 1969?
Chupa Chups
He also worked with Walt Disney on the unfinished animated film Destino.
Q 22What exotic pet did Dalí frequently take out in public alongside his anteater?
An ocelot named Babou
He was equally famous for his upturned moustache.
Q 23Dalí's Lobster Telephone was made in 1936 for which English collector and poet?
Edward James
It is also known as the Aphrodisiac Telephone; James also commissioned the Mae West Lips Sofa.
Q 14Dalí said the soft watches in The Persistence of Memory were inspired not by relativity but by what?
Camembert melting in the sun
He gave the answer when the physicist Ilya Prigogine asked him about Einstein.
Q 15Where has The Persistence of Memory hung since an anonymous donor gave it in 1934?
Museum of Modern Art, New York
It had first sold at the Julien Levy Gallery for $250.
Q 16What covers the orange watch that does not melt in The Persistence of Memory?
Ants
Dalí revisited the picture in 1954 with The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory.
Q 17What did Dalí call his technique for tapping the subconscious by inducing paranoid delusions?
The paranoiac-critical method
The Surrealists hailed it when he joined the group in 1929.
Q 18What did Dalí wear to deliver a lecture at the 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition?
A deep-sea diving suit
He nearly suffocated inside the helmet.
Q 19Breton's mocking nickname for Dalí, 'Avida Dollars', is what kind of wordplay?
An anagram of Salvador Dalí
Breton coined it in 1949, disgusted by Dalí's commercialism.
Q 20Dalí designed the dream sequence for which 1945 Alfred Hitchcock film?
Spellbound
Ingrid Bergman plays a psychoanalyst treating Gregory Peck.
Q 24Who was Gala, whom Dalí met in 1929 and married in 1934?
His muse and wife, born Elena Diakonova
She had previously been married to the poet Paul Éluard.
Q 25What French caption is painted beneath the object in Magritte's The Treachery of Images?
Ceci n'est pas une pipe
The 1929 painting hangs in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Q 26What hides the face of the bowler-hatted man in Magritte's 1964 self-portrait The Son of Man?
A green apple
The picture plays a key role in the 1999 remake of The Thomas Crown Affair.
Q 27In Magritte's The Lovers (1928), the kissing couple's heads are wrapped in what?
White cloth
Some link it to his mother's drowning, when her wet nightgown was found wrapped around her face.
Q 28Magritte's Golconda (1953) fills the sky over red-roofed houses with dozens of what?
Men in bowler hats and overcoats
It hangs in the Menil Collection in Houston.
Q 29What was Magritte's nationality?
Belgian
He was born in Lessines in Hainaut in 1898 and worked in a wallpaper factory before painting full-time.
Q 30What did Magritte, along with his brother, secretly do to make money in the 1940s?
Forge paintings and banknotes
Belgium later put him on a 500-franc note; his 'Vache period' of crude Fauve-style pictures came in 1947-48.