Cubism was a 20th century art movement that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music and literature. It developed as a short but highly significant art movement between about 1907 and 1914 in France. 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.

It is clear that the roots of cubism are to be found in the two distinct tendencies of Paul 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 went further than Cézanne; they represented all the surfaces of depicted objects in a single picture plane as if the objects had had all their faces visible at the same time, in the same plane. This new kind of depiction revolutionised the way in which objects could be visualised in painting and art and opened the possibility of a new way of looking at reality.

The most notable of cubism's small group of active participants were the Spaniards Juan Gris and Pablo Picasso, accompanied by French artist Georges Braque, then residents of Montmartre, Paris. These artists were the movement's main innovators. After meeting in 1907 Braque and Picasso in particular began working on the development of Cubism in 1908 and worked closely together until the outbreak of World War I in 1914.