Cubist describes an art style that shows objects from multiple angles at once, as if you could see all sides of something simultaneously. Imagine looking at a face straight on and from the side at the same time, with both views jumbled together on the same canvas. That's what cubist artists like Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque did in the early 1900s.

Instead of painting things the way a camera sees them, cubist painters broke objects into geometric shapes (cubes, triangles, rectangles) and rearranged them. A cubist portrait might show someone's profile and front view together, with sharp angles and fractured planes. A cubist still life might display a guitar from the top, side, and front all at once.

Cubism changed how artists thought about representing reality. Instead of creating the illusion of three dimensions on a flat surface, cubists showed that a painting could be honest about being flat while still capturing something true about how we experience objects in space.