Cubism Explained: History, Artists, Phases & Legacy

Cubism shattered rules painters had followed since the Renaissance. Beginning in Paris around 1907, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque broke objects into facets and showed them from several angles at once, creating a new way of seeing that still shapes art, design and architecture today.

Cubism in Questions and Answers

What is Cubism?

Cubism is an early-20th-century art movement that dropped the single, fixed viewpoint of traditional painting. Artists broke people and objects into geometric planes and showed several sides at once, stressing the flat surface of the canvas instead of creating an illusion of depth.

Who invented Cubism?

Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque developed Cubism together in Paris, working closely from about 1907–08 until 1914. Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes and Robert Delaunay soon expanded it.

Why is it called Cubism?

French critic Louis Vauxcelles, reviewing landscapes Braque painted at L’Estaque in 1908, said they reduced everything to “cubes.” The remark stuck, and within a few years “Cubism” was the movement’s accepted name.

What was the first Cubist painting?

There is no single agreed “first.” Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907, Museum of Modern Art, New York) is widely seen as the breakthrough work, and Braque’s 1908 L’Estaque landscapes are the paintings that gave the movement its name.

What is the difference between Analytic and Synthetic Cubism?

Analytic Cubism (roughly 1908–12) took objects apart into many small, overlapping facets in browns, greys and ochres. Synthetic Cubism (roughly 1912–14) built images up from larger, simpler shapes, brighter colours and pasted-on materials such as newspaper and wallpaper.

What is papier collé?

Papier collé (“pasted paper”) is a type of collage in which cut paper is glued onto a drawing or painting. Braque made his first one, Fruit Dish and Glass, in September 1912 using wood-grain wallpaper bought in Avignon. Picasso quickly took up the technique.

Who were the main Cubist artists?

The core figures were Picasso, Braque, Juan Gris and Fernand Léger. Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Marie Laurencin, Henri Le Fauconnier and Louis Marcoussis worked around them, along with the sculptors Alexander Archipenko, Jacques Lipchitz and Raymond Duchamp-Villon.

Why is Cubism important?

Cubism showed that a painting could be its own constructed reality rather than a window onto the world. That idea opened the door to abstract art, collage, Dada, Surrealism and Constructivism, and it changed sculpture, architecture and design.

1. The Roots: Cézanne, African and Iberian Art

Cubism did not appear out of nowhere. Its most important ancestor was Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), the Post-Impressionist who built landscapes and still lifes out of blocks of colour and was never afraid to tilt a table or bend a horizon to make a picture hold together. In a letter to the painter Émile Bernard dated 15 April 1904, he advised treating nature “by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone”; Braque and Picasso read these letters after Bernard published them in the Mercure de France. Cézanne died in October 1906, and the memorial showing of his work at the 1907 Salon d’Automne in Paris made a deep impression on the avant-garde. Braque’s 1908 L’Estaque paintings were painted, as the Met puts it, in emulation of Cézanne.

A second spark came from outside Europe. In May or June 1907, Picasso visited the ethnographic museum at the Palais du Trocadéro in Paris and saw African sculpture and masks. He was also studying ancient Iberian sculpture from his native Spain. These objects, many of which had reached French collections through colonialism, showed him a way to simplify and distort the human face that owed nothing to classical ideals of beauty. The colonial history is part of Cubism’s story, and museums today discuss it openly.

Other influences mattered too: Paul Gauguin’s “primitivism” (see our Paul Gauguin profile), Henri Matisse’s bold simplifications (see Henri Matisse) and El Greco’s stretched, restless figures.

Cubism asked a radical question: why should a painting show only what one eye sees, from one spot, in one instant?

2. Proto-Cubism (about 1906–1909)

Art historians use “Proto-Cubism” for the experimental years when forms were turning geometric and colours were narrowing, but the full Cubist language did not yet exist. The key work is Picasso’s huge Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, painted in his Bateau-Lavoir studio in Montmartre in June–July 1907 after many sketches and studies. Its five angular nudes, two with mask-like faces, shocked even his friends. MoMA notes that the painting draws on sources ranging from European painting to African, Iberian and Oceanic sculpture. Picasso did not publicly exhibit it for almost nine years; it was first shown in 1916.

Braque, then a young Fauve painter from Le Havre, saw the canvas in Picasso’s studio. By 1908 he was painting the houses and trees of L’Estaque as stacked, simplified blocks in greens and ochres. When those canvases were shown at Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler’s gallery in November 1908, a display the Met calls the first Cubist exhibition, Vauxcelles wrote in Gil Blas that Braque was reducing everything “to geometric schemas, to cubes.” In summer 1909, Picasso’s landscapes from Horta de Ebro in Spain pushed the same idea further.

3. Analytic Cubism (about 1908/1910–1912)

In the Analytic phase, Picasso and Braque worked so closely that their paintings can be hard to tell apart. They took a subject such as a violin, a bottle, a guitarist or a portrait sitter and “analysed” it into dozens of small, transparent-looking planes seen from different angles, then fitted those planes back together in a shallow, relief-like space.

• Multiple viewpoints: the front, side and top of an object appear at once.
• Muted palette: browns, greys, ochres and blacks, so colour would not distract from structure.
• Everyday subjects: café tables, musical instruments, glasses, pipes, newspapers and playing cards. Landscapes became rare.
• Letters and numbers: stencilled words anchored the image to the real, flat surface.

Dates vary by source: Tate dates Analytic Cubism to 1908–12, while the Met describes its most abstract, “hermetic” stage as 1910–12. A well-known example is Picasso’s Portrait of Ambroise Vollard (1910, Pushkin Museum, Moscow), where the dealer’s face surfaces from a shimmering lattice of facets. Explore Picasso’s paintings in our Pablo Picasso profile.

4. Synthetic Cubism (about 1912–1914 and after)

By 1912 the pictures had become so fragmented that the subject was nearly lost. The solution was to build images up instead of breaking them down. In 1912 Picasso glued a piece of printed oilcloth imitating chair caning onto Still Life with Chair Caning and framed it with rope. That September in Sorgues, near Avignon, Braque made Fruit Dish and Glass (now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art), the first papier collé, using strips of mass-produced wood-grain wallpaper.

In Synthetic Cubism, a cut piece of paper could simply stand for a guitar or a tabletop. Shapes grew larger and flatter, colours brightened, and real-world materials such as newsprint, labels, sand and sawdust entered the picture. Tate treats this arrival of real objects inside a picture as a turning point that shaped much of modern art.

Juan Gris (1887–1927), a Spaniard who moved to Paris in 1906, became a leading Synthetic Cubist, with crisp, carefully calculated compositions and richer colour. He debuted in 1912 with Homage to Pablo Picasso. See his work in our Juan Gris profile.

5. Salon Cubism, Room 41 and the Section d’Or

Picasso and Braque hardly ever exhibited at the big public salons, because they were under contract to the dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. The public met Cubism through another group. At the 1911 Salon des Indépendants, Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Henri Le Fauconnier, Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger and Marie Laurencin hung together in “Room 41,” causing a scandal that made “Cubism” a household word.

In 1912 Gleizes and Metzinger published Du “Cubisme”, the first major book on the movement. In October 1912 the Section d’Or (“Golden Section”) group, which met at the home of the Duchamp brothers in Puteaux, staged the largest Cubist exhibition before the First World War, at the Galerie La Boétie in Paris. The name came from Jacques Villon and nodded to the golden ratio, presenting Cubism as part of a long classical tradition. In 1913 the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, the movement’s great champion, published Les Peintres cubistes. See Marcel Duchamp, one of the Puteaux circle, in our Marcel Duchamp profile.

6. Offshoots and Related Movements

Orphism (about 1912–1914). Apollinaire coined the term for the colour-driven, increasingly abstract work of Robert and Sonia Delaunay, named after the mythical musician Orpheus to suggest that painting could work like music. Robert Delaunay preferred the word “simultanism.” František Kupka is also linked with it.

Tubism. Fernand Léger’s version of Cubism, with its swelling cylinders and machine-like forms (as in Nudes in the Forest, 1909–11), earned the nickname “Tubism.” See our Fernand Léger profile.

Futurism and Cubo-Futurism. Italian Futurists such as Umberto Boccioni, who launched their movement in 1909, borrowed Cubist fragmentation to express speed and motion. In Russia, Cubo-Futurism merged the two in the 1910s. Britannica lists Lyubov Popova and Kazimir Malevich among its painters, and Malevich went on to invent Suprematism.

Purism (1918–1925). After the war, Amédée Ozenfant and Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (the future architect Le Corbusier) published Après le Cubisme (After Cubism, 1918). They criticised late Cubism as decorative and called for clean, machine-age forms. Léger was a close ally.

Crystal Cubism and Art Deco. During and after the war, Gris, Metzinger and others moved toward a calmer, more architectural “crystal” Cubism. Its sleek geometry fed into 1920s Art Deco, visible in the portraits of Tamara de Lempicka.

7. Beyond Painting: Sculpture, Architecture and Design

The Met names Alexander Archipenko, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Jacques Lipchitz as the major Cubist sculptors. They opened up solid forms with voids and interlocking planes. Duchamp-Villon designed the façade of the Maison Cubiste (Cubist House) shown in Paris in 1912. In Prague, Czech architects developed a true Cubist architecture, the only place where the term is regularly applied to buildings. For a later Spanish sculptor shaped by his country’s traditions and the modern movements of his day, see Alberto Sánchez.

8. Why Cubism Mattered and Its Legacy

Cubism turned painting from a window into an object, a constructed thing with its own rules. That shift led directly to the abstraction of Mondrian and Malevich. It made collage and assemblage central to modern art, and it gave Dada and Surrealism a toolkit for cutting reality apart. Its influence reached across the world, from Diego Rivera’s Cubist years in Paris (his wife Frida Kahlo has her own WooArts profile) to Russian Constructivism and American modernism. It also spread into literature (Gertrude Stein, Apollinaire), music and ballet.

The First World War broke up the original group: on 2 August 1914, Picasso saw Braque and André Derain off at the Avignon station to join the army, and Braque was badly wounded in the head at Carency in May 1915. But the Cubist way of seeing, with its many angles, its fragments and its pieces of everyday life glued into art, never went away. You can see it today in graphic design, photomontage and digital collage.

Every collage, every photomontage, every layered digital image owes something to a strip of wallpaper Braque glued down in 1912.

Cubism Timeline

• 1906 — Paul Cézanne dies in Aix-en-Provence; Juan Gris arrives in Paris.
• 1907 — Picasso sees African art at the Trocadéro and paints Les Demoiselles d’Avignon; Cézanne memorial showing at the Salon d’Automne.
• 1908 — Braque paints at L’Estaque; his November show at Kahnweiler’s gallery prompts Vauxcelles’s “cubes” remark.
• 1909 — Picasso’s Horta de Ebro landscapes; Futurist Manifesto published.
• 1910–12 — “High” Analytic Cubism; Picasso’s Portrait of Ambroise Vollard (1910).
• 1911 — “Room 41” at the Salon des Indépendants brings Cubism to the public.
• 1912 — Picasso’s Still Life with Chair Caning; Braque’s first papier collé; Du “Cubisme”; Section d’Or exhibition; Maison Cubiste.
• 1913 — Apollinaire’s Les Peintres cubistes; Orphism shown at the Indépendants.
• 1914 — First World War begins; on 2 August Picasso sees Braque off to the army, ending their partnership.
• 1918 — Ozenfant and Jeanneret publish Après le Cubisme, launching Purism.
• 1920–25 — Purist review L’Esprit Nouveau; Cubism’s influence spreads into design and architecture.

Artists Who Shaped Cubism

• Pablo Picasso (1881–1973, Spain/France) — co-founder; painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and pioneered collage.
• Georges Braque (1882–1963, France) — co-founder; painted the L’Estaque “cubes” and invented papier collé.
• Juan Gris (1887–1927, Spain/France) — the precise, colourful master of Synthetic Cubism.
• Fernand Léger (1881–1955, France) — the tubular, machine-age Cubism nicknamed “Tubism.”
• Jean Metzinger (1883–1956, France) — theorist and co-author of Du “Cubisme”.
• Albert Gleizes (1881–1953, France) — co-author of Du “Cubisme” and a founder of the Section d’Or.
• Robert Delaunay (1885–1941, France) — brought luminous colour to Cubism and founded Orphism.
• Sonia Delaunay (1885–1979, Ukraine-born/France) — co-founder of Orphism who carried it into textiles and fashion.
• Marie Laurencin (1883–1956, France) — showed in Room 41 in 1911 and was one of the few women among the early Cubists.
• Henri Le Fauconnier (1881–1946, France) — his studio hosted the Salon Cubists; he showed in Room 41.
• Louis Marcoussis (1878–1941, Poland/France) — refined Cubist still lifes and prints; associated with the Section d’Or circle.
• Francis Picabia (1879–1953, France) — moved from Cubism and Orphism toward Dada.
• Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968, France/USA) — Puteaux circle; his Nude Descending a Staircase fused Cubism and motion.
• Raymond Duchamp-Villon (1876–1918, France) — Cubist sculptor who designed the Maison Cubiste façade.
• Roger de La Fresnaye (1885–1925, France) — elegant, colourful Salon Cubist.
• Diego Rivera (1886–1957, Mexico) — painted Cubist works in Paris in the 1910s before turning to murals.
• Alexander Archipenko (1887–1964, Ukraine/USA) — Cubist sculptor who used holes and concave forms as positive shapes.
• Jacques Lipchitz (1891–1973, Lithuania/France/USA) — leading Cubist sculptor in stone and bronze.
• Max Weber (1881–1961, Russian-born American) — studied in Paris and helped bring Cubism to the United States.
• František Kupka (1871–1957, Czech/France) — abstract pioneer linked to Orphism.
• Piet Mondrian (1872–1944, Netherlands) — went through a Cubist phase in Paris on his way to pure abstraction.
• Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935, Russia/Ukraine) — Cubo-Futurist who went on to invent Suprematism.
• Lyubov Popova (1889–1924, Russia) — leading Cubo-Futurist painter.
• Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920, Italy/France) — not a Cubist, but part of Picasso’s Paris circle and a friend of Chaïm Soutine, who is also in our collection.
• Tamara de Lempicka (1898–1980, Poland/France) — Art Deco painter whose “soft Cubism” came out of the movement.
• Paul Cézanne (1839–1906, France) — the precursor Picasso and Braque looked to above all.

Cubism in the WooArts Collection

Keep exploring: Cubism · Art Movements · Modernism · Surrealism · Collage · Spanish Artists · French Artists

Fact-checked against the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline essay on Cubism, Tate’s art-term glossary, the Museum of Modern Art’s collection notes on Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, and Encyclopaedia Britannica.