Before the twentieth century, art was recognized as an imitation of nature. Paintings and portraits were made to look as realistic and three-dimensional as possible, as if seen through a window. Artists were painting in a flamboyant style. French postimpressionist Paul C?â?®zannes flattened still lives, and African sculptures gained in popularity in Western Europe when artists went looking for a new way of showing their ideas and expressing their views. In 1907 Pablo Picasso created the painting Les Damsoilles d'Avignon, depicting five women whose bodies are constructed of geometric shapes and heads of African masks rather then faces. This new...
a horse is painfully dying. This would become his most famous painting. Cubism redefined art in the twentieth century. It succeeded in giving people a different perspective with which to look at reality and evoked new emotions. Cubism set a new standard for what is accepted as a work of art. "Art no longer had to be aesthetically right or nice to be a masterpiece"Hoving, 1999.

It also set the stage for other artists to test new styles that would have been considered too unorthodox before. Cubism truly embodied the phrase, "art is in the eye of the beholder."