Cubism was a leap into 20th century garde art movement that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music and literature. It developed as a short but highly significant artistic movement between about 1907 and 1914 in France. Cubism is a painting of a normal scene but painted so that it is viewed from multiple views while the positions of some of the parts are rotated or moved so that it is odd looking and scrambled. In cubist artworks, objects are broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in an abstracted form — instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context. Often the surfaces intersect at seemingly random angles presenting no coherent sense of depth. The background and object planes interpenetrate one another to create the ambiguous shallow space characteristic of cubism.

Some art historians speculate that Cubism originated in the work of Cezanne. For him, paintings should treat the forms of nature as if they were cones, spheres and cylinders. Its roots were implanted in the two distinct tendencies of Cézanne's later work: firstly to break the painted surface into small multifaceted areas of paint thereby emphasising the plural viewpoint given by binocular vision, and secondly his interest in simplification of natural forms into Platonic cylinders, spheres, pyramids and cubes. The cubists, however, went further than Cézanne. They represented objects in all their faces in a single plane. It was as if the object had been opened in all its sides at the same time, in the same frontal plane in relation to the observer. This attitude broke down the objects and showed a new vision of reality. The most notable of its small group of active participants were the French Georges Braque, and the Spaniards Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris. Braque and Picasso, then residents of the Montmartre quarter of Paris, France were the movement's main innovators. After their meeting in 1907 they began working on the development of Cubism in 1908, and worked closely together until the outbreak of World War I in 1914.

French art critic Louis Vauxcelles first used the term "cubism", or "bizarre cubiques", in 1908 after seeing a picture by Braque. He described it as 'full of little cubes', after which the term quickly gained wide use although the two creators did not initially adopt it. Cubism was taken up by many artists in Montparnasse and promoted by art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, becoming popular so quickly that by 1911 critics were referring to a "cubist school" of artists. However, many of the artists who thought of themselves as cubists went in directions quite different from Braque and Picasso. The Puteaux Group was a significant offshoot of the Cubist movement, and included artists like Guillaume Apollinaire, Robert Delaunay, Marcel Duchamp, his brother Jacques Villon, and Fernand Léger.