Cubism was a revolutionary style of art invented in the early 1900s by painters Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Instead of painting objects the way they appear from one viewpoint, like a photograph, Cubist artists showed objects from multiple angles at once, breaking them into geometric shapes like cubes, triangles, and rectangles.

Imagine drawing a guitar. Normally, you'd draw it from one side. But a Cubist painter might show the front, back, and sides simultaneously, fragmenting the guitar into overlapping planes and reassembling them on the canvas. The result looks abstract and puzzle-like, forcing viewers to piece together what they're seeing.

Cubism shocked the art world because it abandoned centuries of tradition. For hundreds of years, Western artists had tried to create realistic illusions of depth and space. Cubists rejected this, treating the canvas as a flat surface where they could experiment with form and perspective in radical new ways.

The movement influenced painting, sculpture, architecture, and design throughout the twentieth century. While a Cubist portrait might look strange or confusing at first, it represents a bold attempt to show reality more completely by capturing what we know about an object from experiencing it fully, rather than what we see in one frozen moment.