Passage: Cubism, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, rejected the single-point perspective that had dominated Western art since the Renaissance. Instead of depicting an object from one fixed viewpoint, Cubist works broke objects into geometric planes and reassembled them to show multiple perspectives simultaneously. This approach aimed to represent the way the human mind actually experiences reality—not as a single frozen image, but as a fragmented collection of viewpoints gathered over time. By abandoning the illusion of three-dimensional depth on a two-dimensional surface, Cubism emphasized the flat reality of the canvas. This shift paved the way for pure abstraction by asserting that art did not need to imitate life, but could create its own structural logic.