Pioneered by Picasso and Braque, Cubism has been described as the first avant-garde art movement of the 20th century . With inspiration from African and Native American art and sculpture, its practitioners deconstructed European conventions of viewpoint, form, perspective to create flattened, fragmented, and revolutionary images . Picasso’s celebrated painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is typically regarded as the original cubist work, with its radical fracturing of objects and figures into distinct areas, corresponding to multiple different viewpoints . Cubism thereafter developed two distinct trends: Analytical Cubism , which continued to interweave perspectival planes in muted blacks, greys and ochre, and later Synthetic Cubism , characterised by simpler shapes, brighter colors, and collage elements such as newspaper. This book presents the prime protagonists of Cubism, with work from artists including Pablo Picasso , Georges Braque , Fernand Léger , Juan Gris , Albert Gleizes , and Robert Delaunay .