By relying on such repeated subject matter, the works also encourage the viewer to concentrate on the stylistic innovations of Cubism rather than on the specificity of the subject matter. Musical instruments such as guitars, violins, and clarinets show up frequently in Cubist paintings, particularly in the works of Braque who trained as a musician. Some shading is used to create an impression of bas-relief with the various geometric shapes seeming to overlap slightly. The piece is also indicative of Braque's attempts to show the same item from different points of view. In this early example of Analytic Cubism, Braque was experimenting further with shallow spacing by reducing the color palette to neutral browns and grays that further flatten out the space. Oil on canvas - The Museum of Modern Art, New Yorkīy 1909, Picasso and Braque were collaborating, painting largely interior scenes that included references to music, such as musical instruments or sheet music. Because it predicted some of the characteristics of Cubism, Les Demoiselles is considered proto or pre-Cubist. Braque is one of the few artists who studied it intently in 1907, leading directly to his later collaboration with Picasso. The painting was widely thought to be immoral when it was finally exhibited in public in 1916. Both the cloth wrapped around her lower body and her body itself are given the same amount of attention as the negative space around them as if all are in the foreground and all are equally important. For instance, the body of the standing woman in the center is composed of angles and sharp edges. Picasso abandoned the Renaissance illusion of three-dimensionality, instead presenting a radically flattened picture plane that is broken up into geometric shards. The unusual formal elements of the painting were also part of its shock value. Their blatant sexuality was heightened by Picasso's influence from non-Western art that is most evident in the faces of three of the women, which are rendered as mask-like, suggesting that their sexuality is not just aggressive, but also primitive. The subject matter of nude women was not in itself unusual, but the fact that Picasso painted the women as prostitutes in aggressively sexual postures was novel. Picasso's painting was shocking even to his closest artist friends both for its content and for its formal experimentation.

These experiments would be taken up by the likes of Piet Mondrian, who continued to explore their use of the grid, abstract system of signs, and shallow space. Cubism paved the way for non-representational art by putting new emphasis on the unity between a depicted scene and the surface of the canvas.Their use of newspaper would lead later historians to argue that, instead of being concerned above all with form, the artists were also acutely aware of current events, particularly World War I. In the second phase of Cubism, Synthetic Cubism practicioners explored the use of non-art materials as abstract signs.This first phase of the movement was called Analytic Cubism. Some historians have argued that these innovations represent a response to the changing experience of space, movement, and time in the modern world. Cubists explored open form, piercing figures and objects by letting the space flow through them, blending background into foreground, and showing objects from various angles.The artists abandoned perspective, which had been used to depict space since the Renaissance, and they also turned away from the realistic modeling of figures.A number of artists adopted Picasso and Braque's geometric faceting of objects and space including Fernand Léger and Juan Gris, along with others that formed a group known as the Salon Cubists.

Artists working in the Cubist style went on to incorporate elements of collage and popular culture into their paintings and to experiment with sculpture. The movement was one of the most groundbreaking of the early-20 th century as it challenged Renaissance depictions of space, leading almost directly to experiments with non-representation by many different artists. Rather than modelled forms in an illusionistic space, figures were depicted as dynamic arrangements of volumes and planes where background and foreground merged. Drawing upon Paul Cezanne’s emphasis on the underlying architecture of form, these artists used multiple vantage points to fracture images into geometric forms. Cubism developed in the aftermath of Pablo Picasso's shocking 1907 Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in a period of rapid experimentation between Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque.

Cubism artist