What is Cubism and who invented it?

Cubism is a style of painting and sculpture that fragments objects into geometric shapes and shows multiple perspectives simultaneously rather than from a single fixed viewpoint. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque developed it together between 1908 and 1914, though Picasso's 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is generally considered its seed.

The name came from a critic who dismissed Braque's work as made of "little cubes" — meant as an insult, adopted as a label.

Why was it revolutionary?

Because Western painting since the Renaissance had been organized around a single, stable viewpoint — the eye of an observer standing in a fixed position. Perspective made painting look like a window onto a consistent reality.

Cubism refused this. It argued that reality is not seen from one fixed point. We know objects from multiple angles, from memory, from different times and distances simultaneously. Why should painting pretend otherwise?

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon shows five figures whose eyes, noses, and faces are simultaneously frontal and in profile. It is disorienting because it is honest about how perception actually works — layered, temporal, plural.

What did it lead to?

Nearly everything in modern art. Abstraction, Constructivism, Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism — all responded to the rupture Cubism made in the idea that art should represent a consistent external reality. It opened the question: what else is painting allowed to be?

The answer is everything since.