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In the fall of 1908, two clashing art exhibitions vied for the attention of Paris. A Henri Matisse retrospective opened at the avant-garde Salon d’Automne, showcasing the sort of wildly colorful paintings the public had come to expect from the artist. Meanwhile, at the more modest Kahnweiler Gallery, a Georges Braque solo exhibition displayed 27 works unlike anything seen before, saturated with geometric landscapes and canvases seemingly slashed by angular lines. “Braque composes his paintings according to his absolute concern for complete originality, complete truth,” the poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire enthusiastically wrote in the exhibition’s catalogue essay. “Every one of his paintings commemorates an effort that no one before him has yet attempted.”

Opinions about Braque’s show—now considered the birth of Cubism—were mixed. Not everyone was enamored with this new style of painting that fractured the picture plane into the tessellated texture of a broken mirror, presenting the same object from multiple viewpoints within a single canvas. Braque’s newest works challenged the traditional use of illusionistic perspective and shading in painting; viewers were uncomfortable.

A name is born

Braque had tried to enter a few of those same paintings into the Salon d’Automne a few months earlier, but the jury (headed by Matisse) rejected them. “Braque has just sent a painting made of small cubes,” Matisse reported to art critic Louis Vauxcelles, who was dumbfounded as to what that could possibly mean.

Vauxcelles understood Matisse’s meaning more clearly when he saw Braque’s exhibition himself. Soon after the show’s opening, he wrote an incendiary review for the literary journal Gil Blas, criticizing Braque, stating that he “despises form, reduces everything, places and figures and houses, to geometric schemes, to cubes.” (The same term Matisse had planted in his mind now appeared in print.)

Other critics soon adopted that disparaging moniker for the new works being painted by Braque, Pablo Picasso, and a growing number of artists in their circle. But whereas Vauxcelles used ‘cubes’ to describe what he found so offensive, the following year art critic Charles Morice morphed the word into an umbrella term for the avant-garde trend as a whole. “Today, the chief of the audacious is Georges Braque,” Morice wrote in Mercure de France after seeing works by Braque, Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Henri Le Fauconnier, and Robert Delaunay at the Salon des Indépendants in 1909. “And I believe I do see that Mr. Braque is on the whole a victim—setting ‘Cubism’ aside—of an admiration for Cézanne that is too exclusive or ill considered.”

The term that Morice put in mocking quotation marks stuck, and the style pioneered by Braque and Picasso became known as Cubism. By 1910, just three years into the short-lived movement, the term was widespread.

The Cubists fight back

“Cubism is not, as the public generally thinks, the art of painting everything in the form of cubes,” Apollinaire wrote defensively of his friends’ work in L’Intransigeant in 1911. “In 1908 we saw several paintings by Picasso depicting some simply and solidly drawn houses, which gave to the public the illusion of such cubes, and thus the name of our youngest school of painting was born.”

While, Apollinaire made his arguments in print, Picasso and Braque had fun with their new moniker in their studios. Picasso incorporated a clever pun into a (now lost) still life, Bouillon Kub (1912), stenciling the name for the square-shaped seasoning used to instantly make soup broths. Kub was a reference to a mass-produced and ultra-modern item. This was similar to his frequent inclusion of newspaper mastheads, cheap advertisements, and popular song lyrics in his work. But in this instance, he was poking fun at the name that naysaying critics had chosen to describe his paintings.

Braque responded a few months later with The Violin (1912), a monochromatic painting of a violin seen simultaneously from different angles, celebrating Czech violinist Jan Kubelík. When the painting was exhibited the following year at the New York Armory Show, a blockbuster exhibition that introduced European modernism to American audiences, the American press jokingly noted that Braque had put the “cube in Kubelick” (and the “art in Mozart”).

Newspapers—the platform for many of the verbal attacks hurled at the Cubists—were also subject to the scissor treatment as of 1912, when Braque and Picasso began incorporating pasted pieces of cut newsprint into their papier collés. Just as their paintings challenged the modes of representation prized since the Renaissance, these glued collages elevated low brow materials to high art and cheekily asked: why paint something when you could just paste it onto your canvas?

Once Cubism got its footing, however, Picasso and Braque seemed to (playfully or not) ignore the idea that it existed altogether. When Picasso was interviewed by the Paris-Journal in 1911, he unequivocally said that “there is no Cubism,” and promptly excused himself to go feed his hungry monkey, El Mono.

Behind closed doors, it is impossible to know what Picasso and Braque actually thought of the term. Later in life, when asked why there was no discussion of Cubism in the written correspondence between himself and Picasso, Braque answered: “During [the Cubist] years, Picasso and I said things to one another that will never be said again … All that will end with us.”

The joke (on them or, more likely, by them) is that of course it didn’t. For such an ephemeral movement, Cubism is alive today, in museums, textbooks, and the movements Cubism opened the door for—movements that would come to define the 20th century.