Probably the most important and certainly the most influential movement of modern art, cubism was created by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Georges Braque (1882-1963) between 1907 and 1908.
Creating a new dimension in painting, the Cubists abandoned the perspective, which had been used to represent space since the Renaissance, and also distanced themselves from realistic models of human figures. Instead, they represented objects from various angles. Inspired by Cézanne, after a retrospective of her works seen in 1906, Picasso and Braque began to work together, intentionally abandoning the European artistic traditions of creating the illusion of space from fixed points of view. It all started with Picasso's painting of 1907, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, which showed the influence of Cézanne as well as the influences of African masks and Iberian sculptures. The first phase was called analytical cubism and lasted until 1912. The second phase became known as synthetic cubism, as it also used non-artistic materials - such as the newspaper - as collage elements and brighter colours. Synthetic cubism lasted until 1914. Other artists began to experiment with personal interpretations of concepts, and in general Cubism inspired several artists and subsequent movements.

By depicting objects from several angles simultaneously, Cubists showed more than conventional images viewed from a single perspective. To obtain this effect on flat surfaces, his representations from different angles resemble geometric planes, and one of the first critics of his works, Louis Vauxcelles, called them "small cubes," which inspired the name of cubism.