Cubism
Give up the single viewpoint and fold even the faces you could not possibly see into one surface. It is the invention that rearranged, after some five hundred years, the promise of perspective the Renaissance had made. One of the sparks was the Cézanne retrospective at the 1907 Salon d'Automne. And the name comes, once again, from the same man: in 1908 Louis Vauxcelles said of a Braque that it reduced everything to cubes. The same critic who named Fauvism. Neither Picasso nor Braque ever called themselves Cubists. The closeness of those two is a strange thing. Braque later looked back and said they had been like two mountaineers roped together — and the pictures they made in these years are genuinely hard to tell apart. (The influence of African sculpture on Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is often described, though recent scholarship disputes the order of events.) That painting dates from 1907, but it was not seen in public for another nine years. Picasso long called it Le Bordel d'Avignon; when it was first shown at the Salon d'Antin in July 1916, the poet André Salmon retitled it Les Demoiselles d'Avignon to soften the shock. Even the title of the most famous painting of the twentieth century was given to it by someone else. And this band holds one more invention that runs straight into daily life: cutting and pasting. In May 1912 Picasso glued a piece of oilcloth printed with chair caning onto the picture and framed the edge with rope. That September, Braque saw a wood-grain wallpaper in a shop window in Avignon, cut it up and pasted it into a picture. Instead of painting the world, bring a fragment of it in as it is — collage was born. The method passed into photomontage, then into graphic design, and runs all the way to the copy and paste you do every day.