This refers to a defining movement in early 20th art, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. It is considered to have begun in 1907 with Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon. The name is based on Henri Matise and Louis Vauxcelles’s remark that Georges Braque’s painting, Houses at L’Estaque, looked like it was composed of cubes. Cubism rejected the single point perspective that had been in vogue since the Renaissance as well as the need for art to faithfully portray the real world as it was. Instead, it celebrated the two-dimensional nature of the canvas, representing an object from multiple perspectives using planes.
Cubism evolved in two stages — analytical cubism, which involved austere representations using planes and lines in blacks and greys, and synthetic cubism, which roughly ran from 1912-1914, and used brighter colours, simpler shapes and had elements of a collage, using everyday objects such as like newspapers.
