Picasso and the Invention of Cubism

1. Picasso before Cubism: the child prodigy who could paint anything

Pablo Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain, in 1881, the son of an art teacher, and he could draw with remarkable skill before he was ten. He studied in Barcelona and Madrid, and by his late teens he was already exhibiting paintings that showed complete mastery of the academic style. In 1900 he visited Paris for the first time, and in 1904 he settled there permanently, living in a run-down studio building in Montmartre known as the Bateau-Lavoir. His early Paris years produced the Blue Period, paintings dominated by blue tones and by subjects of poverty and loneliness, and then the Rose Period, warmer and centred on circus performers and acrobats.

By 1906 Picasso was one of the most talked-about young painters in Paris, but he was restless. He had mastered the styles of the past, and he wanted something new. He was looking at the work of Paul Cezanne, who had died that year, and who had suggested that nature could be understood through simple geometric forms — the cylinder, the sphere and the cone. He was also looking at African sculpture, which was arriving in Paris in the collections of dealers and at the ethnographic museum, and which showed him that a face could be carved into bold, simplified planes and still carry enormous power. These two influences — Cezanne's geometry and African sculpture's directness — would come together in the painting that started Cubism.

Picasso was also an intensely competitive artist. He knew the work of Henri Matisse, his great rival, and he knew that Matisse's bright, decorative paintings were winning attention. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon was in part an answer to Matisse, a painting so aggressive and so strange that it could not be ignored. Picasso showed it to a few friends, including Braque, and then rolled it up and put it away. It was not exhibited publicly until 1916, and it was not sold until 1924. But the artists who saw it in his studio understood that something had changed, and the change spread from that room.

2. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon: the painting that broke the rules

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon depicts five naked women in a brothel on Carrer d'Avinyo, a street in Barcelona. The subject itself was provocative, but the painting's real shock was in how it was painted. The women's bodies are flattened and broken into angular planes. Two of the faces are painted like African masks, with staring eyes and striped features. There is no single viewpoint: some figures are shown from the front and others from the side at the same time, and the background dissolves into the same sharp fragments as the bodies. The painting ignores perspective, the system that had governed European art since the Renaissance, and it ignores the idea that a painting should be beautiful or pleasing.

Picasso worked on the painting for months in 1907, repainting it repeatedly and changing the faces as his ideas developed. The African influence is clearest in the two right-hand figures, whose faces he reworked after seeing African masks. The influence of Cezanne is visible in the way the bodies are built from geometric forms. But the result was unlike anything either of those sources had produced. Even Matisse, who saw it early, is said to have laughed and called it a joke. Braque, who also saw it, was more thoughtful — he recognised that Picasso had done something serious, and within a year he was painting in a similar way himself.

Historians still argue about exactly how much of Cubism is contained in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, and whether it should be called the first Cubist painting at all. Some argue that the true Cubist work began later, when Picasso and Braque started working together. Others say that the painting contains all the essential ideas — the fragmentation, the multiple viewpoints, the rejection of perspective — and that everything else was development. What is not in dispute is that the painting was a deliberate break with the past, made by an artist who knew exactly what he was destroying. Picasso later said that painting was not meant to decorate apartments, but was an instrument of war. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon was his declaration of war.

3. Picasso and Braque: two mountaineers roped together

The invention of Cubism was not the work of one man. In 1908, Georges Braque, a French painter a year younger than Picasso, began painting landscapes at L'Estaque in the south of France in which houses and trees were reduced to geometric blocks. When these were exhibited in Paris, the critic Louis Vauxcelles described them as being made of little cubes — and the word Cubism was born. Picasso saw the paintings and recognised a kindred spirit. The two men began to work together, visiting each other's studios almost daily, discussing ideas, and painting in such similar styles that their work from 1909 to 1912 is sometimes difficult to tell apart.

Picasso later described the partnership with a mountaineering image: the two of them were like climbers roped together on a mountain, each depending on the other. The image captures something real about the collaboration. Cubism was developed through conversation and competition, not in isolation. Braque brought a craftsman's care and a love of still life — bottles, guitars, fruit dishes — while Picasso brought a restless energy and a willingness to push ideas to their extreme. Together they stripped painting down to its essentials, removing colour almost entirely in favour of browns, greys and ochres, so that the structure of the painting could be seen clearly.

The partnership also shows how artistic movements actually happen. Cubism was not announced in a manifesto, and there was no single founding moment. It grew out of daily work, shared looking, and mutual criticism between two painters who trusted each other enough to argue. By 1911, other artists — Juan Gris, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger — were painting in Cubist styles and exhibiting together, and the movement had become public. But the core of it, the period that art historians regard as the most inventive, was the private collaboration of Picasso and Braque. When Braque was called up to fight in the First World War in 1914, the partnership ended, and Cubism changed direction. The war scattered the artists of Paris, and the movement never quite returned to the intensity of those years.

4. Analytical Cubism: breaking the world into fragments

The first phase of Cubism, now called Analytical Cubism, ran roughly from 1909 to 1912. Its paintings are difficult to look at, and they were meant to be. A typical Analytical Cubist painting — a portrait, a still life with a guitar, a figure at a table — breaks its subject into dozens of small, overlapping planes. The fragments are painted in a narrow range of browns, greys and blacks, so that colour does not distract from the structure. The subject is often hard to recognise at first, and the viewer has to work to piece it together, like solving a puzzle.

The idea behind this difficulty was serious. Picasso and Braque believed that the old way of painting — a single viewpoint, as if the artist were looking through a window — was a false account of how we actually see the world. In real life, we walk around objects, we see them from several angles, we remember them from different moments. A painting that showed only one view was a simplification. Cubism tried to show more: the front and the side of a face at once, the top and the side of a table, the whole of a guitar rather than one flat image of it. The fragmentation was not decoration; it was an attempt to paint the fullness of experience.

This ambition made Analytical Cubism the most intellectually demanding painting of its time, and also the least popular with the public. Buyers and critics found the paintings ugly and incomprehensible, and Picasso and Braque showed them mainly to a small circle. But within the art world, the work was recognised as a breakthrough. It proved that a painting did not have to imitate nature to be serious, and that the picture surface itself — the arrangement of shapes and planes — could be the subject of the painting. That idea would shape the next hundred years of art.

5. Synthetic Cubism and collage: building pictures from the real world

Around 1912, Cubism changed direction. Picasso and Braque began to build their pictures up from larger, simpler shapes, and to introduce real materials into the painting. Braque pasted a piece of imitation wood-grain wallpaper into a drawing, creating the first papier colle, or pasted paper. Picasso followed by pasting newspaper, sheet music, wallpaper and other printed material into his paintings, and by adding sand and other textures to his paint. This phase is called Synthetic Cubism, because it synthesised — built up — pictures from separate elements, rather than analysing objects into fragments.

Collage was a revolution in itself. Before Cubism, a painting was made of paint on canvas, and everything in it was an illusion — a painted newspaper was still paint. In a collage, the newspaper is a real newspaper, and the painting becomes a real object in the world rather than a window onto an imaginary one. The distinction between art and life, between the picture and the thing pictured, was deliberately blurred. Later artists would take this idea much further — the Dadaists, the Surrealists, and the Pop artists all owe a debt to the moment when Picasso stuck a piece of newspaper onto a canvas.

Synthetic Cubism was also brighter and more playful than the Analytical phase. Colour returned, shapes became bolder and flatter, and the paintings became easier to enjoy. Picasso painted still lifes with guitars and bottles in which the objects are suggested by a few curved shapes and a piece of pasted paper, and the wit of these pictures is part of their point. The movement had moved from difficulty to delight, and it was this lighter, more decorative Cubism that spread most widely, influencing design, architecture and the decorative arts across Europe. By the time the First World War began in 1914, Cubism had already changed what a painting could be.

6. The quarrel over credit: who invented Cubism?

Few questions in modern art have been argued over more than the question of who invented Cubism. Picasso and Braque themselves gave different accounts at different times, and their dealers and supporters each had their own version. Picasso, who lived until 1973 and became the most famous artist of the twentieth century, tended to be presented as the sole inventor, with Braque as a follower. Braque, who was quieter and less interested in publicity, was often pushed into the background. Modern historians are clear that this version is unfair: the invention was a joint achievement, and Braque's contributions — the first Cubist landscapes, the invention of pasted paper, the discipline of the still life — were essential.

The quarrel matters because it reveals how art history is written. The artist who lives longest, talks most, and sells best often gets the credit, while the quieter collaborator is forgotten. Braque's case has been made more strongly in recent decades, and exhibitions now present the two as equal partners. But the argument also shows something about Picasso himself: he was a borrower and a competitor who took ideas from everyone around him — from Cezanne, from African sculpture, from Braque, from his lovers and friends — and transformed them into something unmistakably his own. That is not a criticism. It is a description of how he worked, and it is one reason his output was so vast and so varied.

There is also a wider question about whether Cubism was invented at all, or whether it was the inevitable result of forces that were already at work. The art world of 1907 was full of painters breaking rules: Matisse with colour, the German Expressionists with emotion, the Italian Futurists with movement. Cubism was the most radical of these breaks, but it was part of a moment when European art was changing in every direction. Picasso and Braque gave that change its most rigorous and most influential form, and that is why their names are attached to it.

7. The legacy: how Cubism remade art, design and seeing

The influence of Cubism is hard to overstate. Within a decade of its invention, its ideas had spread to sculpture, where artists like Alexander Archipenko and Jacques Lipchitz carved figures from interlocking planes; to architecture, where the geometric simplification of Cubism fed into the modernist buildings of the 1920s; and to design, where Cubist patterns appeared on textiles, posters and furniture. The Italian Futurists borrowed Cubist fragmentation and added speed and movement. The Russian Constructivists borrowed its geometry and put it to political use. The abstract painters of the next generation — Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich — started from the Cubist discovery that a painting could be built from shapes alone, without representing anything at all.

Cubism also changed how ordinary people see. Its multiple viewpoints became a common language in photography, in film editing, and in advertising. The idea that a single view is incomplete, and that truth comes from combining several perspectives, is now so familiar that it is hard to remember how radical it once was. Even the language of modern life — the fragmented screen, the collage of images, the cut-and-paste of digital media — has something of Cubism in it. Picasso himself moved on from Cubism after the war, painting in many different styles for the rest of his long life, but he never abandoned the freedom it had given him: the freedom to show a face from the front and the side at once, to paint what he knew rather than what he saw, and to treat the canvas as a place for invention rather than imitation.

Today, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where it is one of the most visited paintings in the world. Visitors stand before it and try to make sense of its five staring figures, just as Picasso's friends did in 1907. The painting still shocks, which is a measure of how far ahead of its time it was. Cubism began in a small Paris studio, in conversation between two painters, and it ended by changing the way the whole world looks at pictures. That is the scale of what Picasso and Braque achieved, and it is why their names are still argued over, still exhibited, and still studied more than a century later.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Pablo Picasso
• Wikipedia — Pablo Picasso
• Wikipedia — Cubism
• Tate — Cubism (art term)

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• Who Was Allama Iqbal? — Allama Iqbal was Pakistan's national poet, whose ideas shaped the case for Pakistan. This explains his poetry, his philosophy and his legacy.
• Who Was Benazir Bhutto? — Benazir Bhutto was the first woman to lead a Muslim-majority country, serving as prime minister of Pakistan in 1988-90 and 1993-96.
• Who Was Bob Marley? — Bob Marley took reggae from Jamaica to the world and became a symbol of peace, resistance and unity. This explains his life, his music and his legacy.
• Who Was Bruce Lee? — Bruce Lee was the martial artist and actor who carried Hong Kong action cinema to the world and founded Jeet Kune Do, leaving a lasting influence.
• Who Was Charles Darwin? — Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, published in On the Origin of Species in 1859, became the foundation of modern biology.
• Who Was Charles Dickens? — Charles Dickens was the greatest novelist of the Victorian era, whose serialised novels mixed comedy, social criticism and unforgettable characters.
• Who Was Charlie Chaplin? — Charlie Chaplin created the Little Tramp, the most famous screen character of the silent era, and directed classics City Lights and The Great Dictator.
• Who Was Cleopatra? — Cleopatra VII was the last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt, a multilingual stateswoman who kept her kingdom independent for 21 years before Rome annexed it.
• Who Was Diego Maradona? — Diego Maradona was an Argentine footballer who captained Argentina to the 1986 World Cup and is widely regarded as one of the greatest players in history.
• Who Was Don Bradman? — Don Bradman was an Australian cricketer who averaged 99.94 in Test cricket, a record so far ahead of any other batsman that it remains famous in sport.
• Who Was Elvis Presley? — Elvis Presley took gospel, country and rhythm and blues and turned them into rock and roll, becoming the most famous singer of his century.
• Who Was Emily Dickinson? — Emily Dickinson was an American poet who wrote nearly 1,800 poems in private in Amherst, Massachusetts, and was barely published in her lifetime.
• Who Was Faiz Ahmed Faiz? — Faiz Ahmed Faiz was Pakistan's most celebrated modern Urdu poet, whose verse joined romantic lyricism with resistance to injustice.
• Who Was Franz Beckenbauer? — Franz Beckenbauer was a German footballer known as Der Kaiser, who won the World Cup as captain in 1974 and as manager in 1990.
• Who Was Freddie Mercury? — Freddie Mercury was the lead singer of Queen, a four-octave voice and fearless showman who wrote Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions.
• Who Was Frida Kahlo? — Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for uncompromising, brilliantly coloured self-portraits exploring identity, the body and death.
• Who Was Galileo Galilei? — Galileo Galilei reshaped astronomy with his telescopic discoveries of 1610, defended a Sun-centred universe, and was tried by the Inquisition in 1633.
• Who Was Genghis Khan? — Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes and built the largest contiguous land empire in history, a conqueror and lawgiver whose legacy is still argued over.
• Who Was George Washington? — George Washington won American independence, presided over the Constitutional Convention, and as first president defined the office — then walked away.
• Who Was Guglielmo Marconi? — Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor who built the first practical wireless telegraph and sent the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901.
• Who Was Henry Ford? — Henry Ford was an American industrialist who founded the Ford Motor Company, built the Model T and perfected the moving assembly line.
• Who Was Isaac Newton? — Isaac Newton wrote the laws of motion and universal gravitation, invented calculus and transformed optics, leaving a lasting legacy in science.
• Who Was James Watt? — James Watt did not invent the steam engine, but his separate condenser of 1765 made it efficient enough to power the Industrial Revolution.
• Who Was Jane Austen? — Jane Austen published six novels in her lifetime, anonymously, and died at 41. This explains her life, her novels, her irony and her growing reputation.
• Who Was Jesus Christ? — Jesus of Nazareth is the central figure of Christianity, the world's largest religion. This explains his life in the Gospels, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Johan Cruyff? — Johan Cruyff was the star of Total Football, won three Ballon d'Or awards, and as a manager built the Barcelona team that shaped modern football.
• Who Was Johannes Gutenberg? — Johannes Gutenberg built the first mechanised printing press in Europe and printed the Gutenberg Bible around 1455, changing how the world shared ideas.
• Who Was John Keats? — John Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome at 25, having written his six great odes in a single year. This explains his short life, his poetry and his fame.
• Who Was Joseph Stalin? — Joseph Stalin led the Soviet Union from the 1920s until 1953, industrialised the country and led it through the Second World War, ruling through terror.
• Who Was Julius Caesar? — Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, crossed the Rubicon and remade Rome's calendar and government, and was murdered by senators who feared he would be king.
• Who Was Kobe Bryant? — Kobe Bryant won five NBA championships with the Los Angeles Lakers and became known for the Mamba Mentality, on and off the court.
• Who Was Leo Tolstoy? — Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, then abandoned literary fame for a radical moral philosophy that influenced Gandhi and the world.
• Who Was Leonardo da Vinci? — Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and filled notebooks with anatomy and engineering, becoming the symbol of the Renaissance.
• Who Was Ludwig van Beethoven? — Ludwig van Beethoven wrote nine symphonies, 32 piano sonatas and the Missa Solemnis, much of it while deaf. This explains his life and legacy.
• Who Was Mahatma Gandhi? — Mahatma Gandhi led India to independence through nonviolent resistance, and his ideas shaped civil-rights movements worldwide.
• Who Was Mao Zedong? — Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China in 1949 and led it until 1976, bringing unification and the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
• Who Was Margaret Thatcher? — Margaret Thatcher was the first woman to serve as British prime minister, leading the UK from 1979 to 1990 through reform, the Falklands War and division.
• Who Was Marie Curie? — Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, a pioneer of radioactivity research.
• Who Was Marilyn Monroe? — Marilyn Monroe was the biggest star of the 1950s, the blonde bombshell of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot, who fought the studio system.
• Who Was Mark Twain? — Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and became America's most famous humorist.
• Who Was Maya Angelou? — Maya Angelou was a poet, memoirist and civil rights activist whose autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings made her widely read.
• Who Was Michael Jackson? — Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, made Thriller, the best-selling album in history, and changed music video, dance and pop stardom.
• Who Was Mirza Ghalib? — Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) is the pre-eminent Urdu and Persian poet of the last Mughal era, whose ghazals on love, loss and doubt are still recited.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali Jinnah? — Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the barrister and statesman who led the All-India Muslim League and became Pakistan's first Governor-General in 1947.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali? — Muhammad Ali was the three-time heavyweight champion who called himself The Greatest, and the most famous athlete of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Napoleon Bonaparte? — Napoleon Bonaparte rose from Corsica to Emperor of the French, redrew the map of Europe, and left a legal code that still shapes law across the world.
• Who Was Nelson Mandela? — Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison under apartheid, then became South Africa's first democratically elected president and a Nobel Peace laureate.
• Who Was Nikola Tesla? — Nikola Tesla developed the alternating-current power system, the induction motor and the Tesla coil, making long-distance electric power practical.
• Who Was Osama bin Laden? — Osama bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in 1988 and organised the September 11, 2001 attacks, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed.
• Who Was Pablo Neruda? — Pablo Neruda was Chile's great poet, a Nobel laureate, a communist senator and a diplomat. This explains his poetry, his politics and his death.
• Who Was Pablo Picasso? — Pablo Picasso co-founded Cubism, painted Guernica, and spent 75 years breaking the rules of art — the most influential artist of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Pelé? — Pele is the only footballer to win three World Cups, the youngest winner, and the game's first global icon. This is his life, his goals and his legacy.
• Who Was Pope Francis? The People's Pope — Pope Francis, the first pope from the Americas and the first Jesuit pope, led the Catholic Church from 2013 to 2025 with an emphasis on mercy and the poor.
• Who Was Prophet Muhammad? — The Prophet Muhammad is the founder of Islam, the world's second-largest religion. This explains his life, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Queen Elizabeth II? — Queen Elizabeth II reigned for 70 years, from 1952 to 2022 — the longest reign in British history. This explains her life, her reign and her legacy.
• Who Was Rabindranath Tagore? — Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the author of the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
• Who Was Rosa Parks? — Rosa Parks was not a tired seamstress who acted on impulse. She was a trained activist and NAACP secretary whose bus refusal was a deliberate act.
• Who Was Rosalind Franklin? — Rosalind Franklin's X-ray image, Photograph 51, gave Watson and Crick the key evidence for the double helix. This is her life and the credit debate.
• Who Was Rumi? — Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet of Konya, wrote the Masnavi and the Divan-e Shams, and became the most widely read poet in the world.
• Who Was Shane Warne? — Shane Warne took 708 Test wickets, bowled the Ball of the Century in 1993 and won the 1999 World Cup with Australia. This explains his career.
• Who Was Stephen Hawking? — Stephen Hawking was a theoretical physicist who showed that black holes emit radiation and wrote A Brief History of Time. He died in 2018, aged 76.
• Who Was Steve Jobs? — Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, was forced out in 1985, built Pixar, and returned to launch the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. He died in 2011, aged 56.
• Who Was Thomas Edison? — Thomas Edison held 1,093 US patents, invented the phonograph and the practical incandescent lamp, and built the first commercial electric power system.
• Who Was Vincent van Gogh? — Vincent van Gogh produced about 2,100 artworks in a single decade, including The Starry Night and Sunflowers, and became famous only after his death at 37.
• Who Was William Shakespeare? — William Shakespeare is the most performed playwright in history, yet almost nothing is reliably known about his private life.
• Who Was William Wordsworth? — William Wordsworth launched English Romanticism with Lyrical Ballads and wrote The Prelude, the great autobiographical poem. This explains his life.
• Who Was Winston Churchill? — Winston Churchill led Britain through the Second World War and won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his record on empire is still debated.
• Who Was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy who composed more than 600 works before his death at 35, defining the Classical era.
• Why Van Gogh Became Famous After Death — Vincent van Gogh died in 1890 almost unknown, and within a few decades his paintings were among the most loved in the world.