Try to draw a coffee cup from the front, back, and top at the same time. That impossible task is the foundation of Cubism, widely considered the most influential art movement of the 20th century. This episode explains how a small group of Paris artists abandoned the Renaissance window of single-point perspective, starting with Paul Cézanne's retrospectives of 1904 to 1907 and his reduction of nature to cylinders, spheres, and cones, then Picasso's 1907 Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and its debt to African masks and Iberian sculpture, and finally the sarcastic 1908 review by critic Louis Vauxcelles that accidentally named the movement.

We then look at the surprising split between Picasso and Braque, working privately under an exclusive contract with dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, and the Salon Cubists like Metzinger, Gleizes, and Léger who caus ...