Cubism began as an avante-garde art movement advanced by by Picasso and Barque.  Starting in about 1906, Picasso began producing paintings influenced by Gauguin, Cezanne, Iberian sculpture and African art.  These works as well as those by Georges Braque, both producing in Montmarte, Paris, soon spawned many artists' production of cubist works. 

The movement was encouraged by the art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and soon spread to Prague, and, in 1913, to America.  In 1912 the Section d'Or, Golden Section, grew out of Cubism and prominent among its members was Marcel Duchamp whose "Jeune Home triste dan un Train" of 1912 shows the affect of Cubism. 

Numerous other outgrowths sprang into existence within a few years.  By 1909 Analytical Cubism had developed and by 1913 Synthetic Cubism.  During the upheaval of World War I the various cubist schools began merging with Dadaism, particularly after the Armistice of 1918.

Dadaism began as a cultural movement in Zurich, Switzerland in 1916.  It was an anarchist movement which was anti-war, anti-bourgeois and ridiculed the meaninglessness of the modern world.  The movement arose in Zurich from a group of German and Romanian ex-patriots who were disgusted with with the Bourgeois values of the early twentieth century which they felt led to the horrors and human devastation of World War I.

The amalgamation of these two movements laid a firm foundation for the development of the multitudinous various movements of modern art which have proliferated since 1918.