The Cubist art movement was founded by painters Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso in the beginning of the 20th century (1907). Cubism is both a philosophical and an aesthetic movement, and Cubist sculpture and painting changed abstract art for the rest of the twentieth century. Cubist paintings are easy to recognize because of their faceted still lifes, musical instruments and nude figures.
Cubism's roots are in African folk sculpture, Fauvism and pointillism. Cubist artists use a non-representational, abstract method to display three-dimensional objects in a two-dimensional medium, from more than one perspective. The African influence came when European artists imported figures from Africa to study their ethnology, but Braque and Picasso placed more importance on the figures' artistic aspects; namely, the stylized and abstract masks. Also, African folk artists used mostly natural materials (like wood), which inspired Cubist artists to use more earth tones.
Cubist paintings are characterized by their fractured, geometric shapes, loosely defined edges and lack of color depth. The cubist method's forms did not rely greatly on the old theory of perspective: the angle of illumination and the disappearing horizon. Instead, cubists sought to use more than one angle of view on a single painting, and to depict objects as the geometric shapes they are comprised of. Artists such as Braque and Picasso used basic geometric figures like the cone, cube, cylinder, pyramid and sphere, and the very term "cubism" was created as an insult to the simplistic method.
Other famous Cubist painters are Roger de la Fresnaye, Fernand Leger, and Francis Picabia. The Cubist movement was fairly short lived, lasting only seven years, but it has had lasting effects on modern art. It went through two phases: analytic cubism which was characterized by polygonal components, human figures and organic colors, and synthetic cubism, which added collage and other decorative elements made from sand, cigar wrappings and newspaper bits.