Cubism is radical fragmentation of form showing multiple viewpoints simultaneously.
Cubism, developed by Picasso and Braque in Paris between 1907 and 1914, is arguably the most radical transformation of Western pictorial convention since the Renaissance. Rather than depicting a single, unified viewpoint, Cubism fragments objects and figures into geometric planes that show multiple angles simultaneously — as if you were walking around the subject and seeing all sides at once, then collapsing them onto a flat surface. Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) is the proto-Cubist breakthrough; the Analytical Cubism of 1909–12 reduced the world to shattered, interlocking facets in monochrome; Synthetic Cubism (from 1912) introduced collage, introducing real materials — newspaper, wallpaper, sand — into the painted surface. Cubism's influence was vast: it directly generated Futurism, Constructivism, De Stijl, and abstraction itself. Its two phases mark a real conceptual break in the middle of the movement. Analytic Cubism (roughly 1908–1912) fractured a single subject — a violin, a face, a bottle — into interlocking planes viewed from multiple angles at once, rendered in an almost monochrome palette so the fragmentation itself, not color, carried the meaning. Synthetic Cubism (from 1912) reversed the logic: rather than breaking a whole into parts, it built compositions up from flat, often collaged fragments — newspaper, wallpaper, rope — reintroducing color, texture and, with Picasso and Braque's papiers collés, the very materials of everyday life into fine art for the first time. That collage move is arguably as radical as the fragmented perspective: it opened the door to Dada, Surrealism, and every later movement that treats the art object as an assembly of real-world material rather than an illusionistic window. Cubism's influence reached far past painting — into Constructivist sculpture, into Bauhaus design thinking about form and volume, into architecture's own interest in simultaneous, multi-angle representation. To look at a Cubist canvas is to watch two artists dismantle the single fixed viewpoint that had governed Western image-making since Brunelleschi formalized linear perspective in the 15th century.