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A Brief History of Cubism

Cubism shattered five centuries of artistic tradition with a single revolutionary insight: that painting need not imitate the way the human eye sees the world. Instead of creating windows into reality, Cubist artists dismantled objects, figures, and spaces into geometric fragments, then reassembled them to reveal multiple perspectives simultaneously. This radical approach fundamentally challenged Western art's most basic assumptions about representation, space, and the nature of visual truth.

The movement erupted in early 20th-century Paris through the unlikely partnership of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, two artists who pushed each other toward increasingly radical experiments in visual perception. Inspired partly by Cézanne's late works and African sculptural forms, they began to question why painting should be limited to a single viewpoint when human experience of objects is far more complex and multi-dimensional.