491--What the hell is cubism?

Fair question. Wikipedia suggests the following:

In cubist artworks, objects are broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in an abstracted form—instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context. Often the surfaces intersect at seemingly random angles, removing a coherent sense of depth. The background and object planes interpenetrate one another to create the shallow ambiguous space, one of cubism's distinct characteristics.

I'm down with this.

Fauvism, by the way, would be:

(Fauvist) works emphasized painterly qualities, and the imaginative use of deep color over the representational values retained by Impressionism. Fauvists simplified lines, made the subject of the painting easy to read and exaggerated perspectives. An interesting prescient prediction of the Fauves was expressed in 1888 by Paul Gauguin to Paul Sérusier,

"How do you see these trees? They are yellow. So, put in yellow; this shadow, rather blue, paint it with pure ultramarine; these red leaves? Put in vermilion."

This is all from Wikipedia, so you can click on all that stuff.

This fauvist work by my boy Matisse says it all: