Cubism is a term describing a revolutionary style of painting created jointly by Georges Braque, France, (1882-1963) and Pablo Ruiz Picasso, Spain, (1881-1973) between 1907–1914. Originally centered in Paris, Cubism became a broad movement that was international in scope, and in which their ideas were adopted and adapted by many other artists. These artists were mainly painters, but Cubist ideas and motifs were also used in sculpture, and to a more limited and superficial degree in the applied arts and occasionally in architecture.

Cubism was a complex phenomenon, but in essence, it involved a new way of representing the world. Abandoning the idea of a single fixed viewpoint that had dominated European painting for centuries, cubist pictures used a multiplicity of viewpoints, so that many different aspects of an object could be simultaneously depicted in the same picture. Such fragmentation and rearrangement of form meant that a painting could now be regarded less as a kind of window through which an image of the world is seen, and more as a physical object on which a subjective response to the world is created. This new approach proved extraordinarily influential, and has been described as perhaps the most important and certainly the most complete and radical artistic revolution since the Renaissance.