Cubism, as an art form, was a revolt against standard artistic perspective and also a development that occurred alongside new scientific advances. At first, Cubists painters, such as Gris, Braque and Picasso, attempted to portray an object in a flat two-dimensional style often found in the works of some of the post-impressionists. This abstract style was used to picture people, flowers, windows, musical instruments and many other items in a new and exciting way. "Three Musicians," a large canvas completed by Picasso in 1921, features three band members with their musical instruments, all portrayed in a straightforward two-dimensional abstract style.
Cubism is all about the abstraction of various recognizable forms and shapes of objects, most of them existing as everyday items. This art style is not about the complete elimination of shape and form. Rather, cubism was concerned with visual experiments in how a person or vase of flowers was portrayed. In a cubist painting or drawing, a guitar, mandolin or violin was often depicted with a distorted shape that also allows the viewer to recognize the instrument. George Braque's highly abstracted oil on canvas, "Violin and Candlestick" (1910), contains a large amount of abstracted forms while still revealing the shape of a violin.
One of the exciting visual features of some cubist paintings was the rendering of objects, including musical instruments, from multiple viewpoints. This innovative technique has often been linked to Einstein's theory of relativity, but chronology makes direct influence unlikely. Although Einstein received a Nobel Prize in 1922, his revolutionary ideas were not known outside the scientific community until 1919, too late to have influenced the cubists. As early as 1912, Juan Gris, as well as both Braque and Picasso, were experimenting with abstracted forms of musical instruments through collage. The similarity seems more a matter of concurrence than direct influence.
Critic Jed Rasula notes: "The enthusiasm with which jazz was received in Europe can be precisely correlated to the passion for primitivism fueling the avant-garde from Cubism through Surrealism." In the first decades of the 20th century both cubism and jazz developed into major cultural forces. With the way and frequency that musical instruments were depicted in the art of many 20th-century modernists, some cultural historians have speculated about the positive influence early jazz may have had on cubist art.