The term refers, when understood narrowly, to the set of interests and formal innovations originated by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso c.1907-11 and developed later by Juan Gris and Fernand Léger. More broadly, it covers a range of distinct variants of this approach employed by associated artists based in Paris in the 1910s and early 1920s. Its ideas and methods proved enormously influential on many different schools of 20th-century art. The name originated as a gibe, appearing in a review by the critic Louis Vauxcelles which referred to simplifications of form into geometric shapes in Braque's pictures of c.1908.

Formalist interpretations of Cubism view its essential significance as lying in a revolutionary approach to the depiction of space, volume, and mass. The naturalism of three-dimensional, illusionistic perspective was overthrown in favour of an emphasis on the material quality of the flat picture plane and the medium...