Cubism was a revolutionary art movement developed in Paris in the early 20th century by artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. The movement fundamentally broke with centuries of European artistic tradition by abandoning the convention of single-point perspective. Instead of depicting subjects from a fixed viewpoint, Cubist artists deconstructed objects and figures, reassembling them in an abstracted form that showed multiple viewpoints simultaneously. This approach aimed to represent a subject in a greater context, combining different perspectives and moments in time within a single image.

The movement's origins can be traced to two key influences. The first was the late work of Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne, who treated nature in terms of its underlying geometric forms, such as the cylinder, sphere, and cone. The second was the non-Western art of Africa and ancient Iberia, which offered a more conceptual and less naturalistic way of representing forms. Picasso’s 1907 painting, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon , is considered a seminal work that marks the beginning of Cubism, integrating these influences into a new, radical visual language.

Cubism is generally divided into two phases. The first, Analytic Cubism (c. 1908–1912), involved a rigorous analysis of form, where objects were fragmented into interlocking geometric planes. The color palette was intentionally subdued, using a nearly monochromatic range of browns, grays, and ochres to focus attention on the complex structure. The second phase, Synthetic Cubism (c. 1912–1919), saw artists "synthesizing" or building up images from simplified shapes and brighter colors. It was during this phase that Picasso and Braque introduced collage (papier collé), incorporating real-world materials like newspaper clippings and wallpaper into their work. Cubism's conceptual approach to representing reality is widely considered one of the most influential developments in 20th-century art, paving the way for numerous other abstract movements.

Cubism formed an important link between early 20th century art and architecture. The historical, theoretical, and socio-political relationships between avant-garde practices in painting, sculpture and architecture had early ramifications in France, Germany, the Netherlands and Czechoslovakia. Though there are many points of intersection between Cubism and architecture, only a few direct links between them can be drawn. Most often the connections are made by reference to shared formal characteristics: faceting of form, spatial ambiguity, transparency, and multiplicity.

While Cubism was primarily an art movement that focussed on visual arts, there were some authors who were influenced by Cubism. This influenced the use of an internal landscape (for characters), stream of consciousness, multiple perspectives, and fragmentation of the individual .

Czech Cubism (referred to more generally as Cubo-Expressionism) was an avant-garde art movement of Czech proponents of Cubism.

Czech Cubists distinguish their work through the construction of sharp points, slicing planes, and crystalline shapes in their art works.These angles allowed the Czech Cubists to incorporate their own trademark in the avant-garde art group of Modernism.

They believed that objects carried their own inner energy which 
could only be released by splitting the horizontal and vertical surfaces that restrain the conservative design and “ignore the needs of the human soul.” It was a way to revolt from the typical art scene in the 
early 1900s in Europe.

This style originated in Czechslovakia during the First repulic as well. It found its use in architecture in early 1920's with introduction of ovals and round shapes on cubistic buildings.

Orphism or Orphic Cubism, a term coined by the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire in 1912, was an offshoot of Cubism that focused on pure abstraction and bright colors, influenced by Fauvism, the theoretical writings of Paul Signac, Charles Henry and the dye chemist Eugène Chevreul.

Tubism is a term coined by the art critic Louis. Vauxcelles in 1911 to describe the style of French artist Fernand Léger.

Crystal Cubism is a distilled form of Cubism with a strong emphasis on flat surface activity and large overlapping geometric planes. The primacy of the underlying geometric structure, rooted in the abstract, controls practically all of the elements of the artwork.