Short answers, pulled from the story.
Cubism was pioneered jointly by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in Paris, beginning around 1907-1908. Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Robert Delaunay, Henri Le Fauconnier, Juan Gris, and Fernand Léger joined the movement. Paul Cézanne's late works, retrospected at the Salon d'Automne in 1904 and again after his death in 1907, were the primary precursor influence.
Cubism depicts subjects from multiple perspectives simultaneously rather than from a single fixed viewpoint, presenting all faces of an object at once in a single flat image. Metzinger and Gleizes linked this technique in their 1912 treatise Du "Cubisme" to Henri Bergson's philosophy of duration, the idea that past and present flow into each other continuously.
Art historian Douglas Cooper identified three phases: Early Cubism from 1906 to 1908, High Cubism from 1909 to 1914 (when Juan Gris emerged as a leading figure after 1911), and Late Cubism from 1914 to 1921. A separate scheme divides the movement into Analytic Cubism (1910-1912) and Synthetic Cubism (roughly 1912-1919), characterized by simpler shapes, brighter colors, and experiments with texture including papier collé.
Cubism introduced collage as a modern art form, with Picasso credited for Still Life With Chair Caning in May 1912 and Braque for papiers collés. Marcel Duchamp extended these ideas into the ready-made. Cubism also influenced ballet through Picasso's 1917 designs for Diaghilev's Parade, shaped literary techniques in the work of Gertrude Stein and poets including Pierre Reverdy, and informed architecture in both France and Czechoslovakia.
Cubist architecture was developed almost exclusively in Bohemia, now the Czech Republic, particularly in Prague. The leading architects were Pavel Janák, Josef Gočár, Vlastislav Hofman, Emil Králíček, and Josef Chochol. The best-known example is the House of the Black Madonna built by Gočár in 1912, which contains the Grand Café Orient, the only Cubist café in the world.
The first organized group exhibition of Cubists took place at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris in the spring of 1911, in a room called Salle 41. The Cubist contribution to the 1912 Salon d'Automne triggered a political scandal, with politician Jean Pierre Philippe Lampué's indignation making the front page of Le Journal on the 5th of October 1912 and prompting a debate in the Chambre des Députés about using public funds to host such art.