Cubism is a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European oil painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture. In cubism artwork, objects are broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in an abstracted form—instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the cubism 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, removing a coherent sense of depth. The background and object planes interpenetrate one another to create the shallow ambiguous space, one of cubism oil paintings's distinct characteristics.
The beginnings of Cubism have been dated between 1907 and 1911. The question of when Cubism began depends on the questions of how it can be defined, what distinguishes Cubist art and who developed it first. Pablo Picasso's 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon has often been considered a proto-Cubist work. Picasso became recognized by 1911 as the inventor of Cubism(picasso cubism), while Braque's importance and precedence was argued later; with respect to his treatment of space, volume and mass in the L'Estaque landscapes.
