Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque founded the art movement known as Cubism in 1907. As an aesthetic and philosophical innovation, this type of painting and sculpture revolutionized modern abstract art for the rest of the 20th century. Paintings in this style are easily recognized by their faceted nudes, guitars, and still lifes in muted colors.

Cubism has roots in Pointillism, Fauvism, and traditional folk sculpture from Africa. Cubists created an abstract, non-representational method of painting to depict three dimensional objects on a two dimensional plane while preserving multiple perspectives. Europeans were importing African figures to study ethnology, but Picasso and Braque valued the nude figurines and masks from an artistic view. They were drawn to the way masks were abstracted and dramatized faces. Also, Africans used natural materials such as wood that inspired cubists to utilize earth tone colors of browns and greens.

Their paintings are characterized by geometric, fractured forms, muted, depthless colors, and unspecified edges. This method produced forms with a reinterpreted a point of view not reliant on classical theories of perspective, the disappearing horizon, or precise angles of illumination. They sought to incorporate simultaneous angles of a view on the same canvas, and highlight objects as merely their geometric constituents. They made free use of the basic Euclidean geometric solids: pyramid, cube, sphere, cylinder, and cone. The name "cubism" was originally intended as an insult to their "simplistic" depictions.

Other important painters in the cubist fashion are Fernand Leger, Roger de la Fresnaye, and Francis Picabia. Although this was a relatively short-lived school of visual art, just lasting from 1907-1914, it has had untold effects on much of modern conceptual art. Guillame Apollinaire described Cubism in 1912 as "the art of painting original arrangements composed of elements taken from conceived rather than perceived reality."

Cubism went through two distinct phases. The first stage of Analytic Cubism, lasting from 1910-1912, is characterized by polygonal structural constituents, neutral organic colors, and human figures. The later phase of Synthetic Cubism added decorative and collage elements in 1912-1914. Painters accentuated more appealing bright colors and non-paint materials like sand, newspaper lettering, and cigar wrappers.