Cubism

Cubism was one of the most influential art movement of the first part of the 20st century. The work of its two leaders (Picasso and Braque) changed the way of painting and thinking of more than one generation. The consequences on the art and the society are huge, even in architecture, or photography.

The two main idea of cubism are the fact that our world is everything except absolute. All our concepts are relative. The second fact is that the cubists wanted to fix a three-dimensional world on a canvas. Picasso and Braque show these results by the analytic cubism.

The cubists don't care about the perspective. They paste the 3 dimensions in two. To help the viewer, they insert small details and clues to understand the topic and to refer to the title. For example, in "the guitar player", Picasso shows us the hand and the head of the player.
They also (in the first period, the "analytic" one) don't care about the colors. It came back after, when they were certain of their technique. That's why it's so monochromatic. They just add bright white color for the idea of light.

Another really important progress is the introduction of words in the painting, with a "commercial" printing. The modern art and after the pop art and its derivatives used this technique a lot to represent among other the consumer society.

For all those reasons, I think that the Cubism was a main influence of the 20st century art. It was the precursor of abstract and it directly influenced the pop art. Picasso and Braque were genius and we can thank them for our current art.