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 caused a public uproar in Room 41 in 1911 while chasing Henri Bergson’s ideas about duration and simultaneity. The conversation covers the shift from monochrome Analytic Cubism to the collage and brighter palette of Synthetic Cubism, Duchamp’s ready-mades, Picasso’s Head of a Woman and the use of negative space, the Cubist House installation of 1912, Czech Cubist architecture in Prague, and the retreat into Crystal Cubism during the First World War.

• How photography forced painting to find a new job
• Reading an Analytic Cubist canvas by finding visual anchors in the scaffolding
• Collage as the birth of remix culture and the lineage to Duchamp’s bicycle wheel
• The House of the Black Madonna and the only Cubist cafe in the world
• Why the trauma of the trenches drove artists toward order and the return to order