Cubism was one of the most influential movement in Western art this century. Beginning with the revolutionary experiments of Picasso and Braque in Paris between 1906 and 1908, cubism gathered momentum and soon spread to the rest of Europe and America. The movements rejection of illusionistic representation in favour of an autonomous pictorial language opened the way to abstraction. The Cubists also invented papier collé and collage and pioneered a new approach to sculpture, innovations that are still being explored today. This book presents a wide cross-section of all these developments, and its 48 full-page colour plates, commentaries and black-and-white illustrations of comparative works provide a perfect introduction to Cubism.

Philip Cooper is an art historian with a special interest in European art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He has co-authored Impressionism (1994) in the Colour Library series.