In the early 1900’s,a revolutionary new form of artistic expression called cubism exploded onto the French

scene. Georges Braque (1882-1963), a native Frenchman, and Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), a French citizen, are

credited as the founders of this new art movement. Both were well-established avant-garde painters by 1907 when they

first began to paint in the style which was later dubbed as cubism. Although Picasso is the more famous of the two,

Braque is considered to have started steering towards cubism before Picasso. Moving away from previous methods of

artistic _expression, they used Paul Cézanne and African art as the groundwork for their art. Instead of attempting to

depict their images to look like they do as we see them with our eyes, they attempted to paint as they saw with their

mind. No longer painting flat 2-dimensional images, these new paintings attempted to capture the 3-dimensional view .

At the same time, geometric shapes were used as the building blocks of form (i.e. a sphere for a body, a cone for a neck,

a block for a head) thereby taking a realistic picture and replacing it with a clearly imagined version of the scene, which

was emphasized by the geometric shapes.

            At precisely the same time, African masks and fetishes began to be imported to the European colonies and many

artists such as Braque and Picasso, who were fascinated by the art, hung them in their studios and used them as a

source of inspiration. Borrowing some of Cézanne’s ideas as well, Picasso painted what is often considered to be the

first cubist painting ever: Le Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). Not considered to be one of his most aesthietically pleasing

paintings, Picasso kept a blanket over it in his studio so as to spare people from seeing it.