Cubism (Phaidon Colour Library)

Cubism was one of the most influential movements 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 movement's rejection of illusionistic representation in favour of an autonomous pictorial language opened the way to abstraction. The Cubists also invented papier colle and collage and pioneered a new approach to sculpture, innovations that are still being explored today.