Glossary: Cubism

The first Cubist painting was Picasso's "Demoiselles D'avignon" dated 1907. Along with Braque he can be credited with the invention of the new art style. No one is quite sure where the term cubism came from but it might have been an art critic who said of Braque's paintings that they reduced "everything to geometric outlines , to cubes". The main idea of cubism was that objects were viewed from a different perspective introducing a random quality. Picasso said "A head is a matter of eyes, nose, mouth which can be distributed in anyway you like.. The head remains a head". Cubism was the starting point for abstraction.