Cubist painters were inspired by the energy which exuded from Paris at the turn of the century. The central goal of Cubist art, and thus the focus of the Cubist aesthetic, was to attack every accepted convention of standard painting. By the time Guillaume Apollinaire applied the title The Cubist Painters, in 1913, to those working in Paris at the time the term was already current. The two dominant artists who created and worked according to the Cubist aesthetic were Pablo Picasso and George Braque. They looked towards an aesthetic that expressed a new age. For them the goal of art was not the previously espoused museum wall, but an authentic investigation through art into the realm of the possible.
The Cubist aesthetic focused the goal of artistic expression onto the experimental pursuit of visual excitement that conveyed the original presence of an inquisitive spirit. Through this inquisitive spirit Cubist artists blurred the notions of appropriateness, and playfully experimented with convention. Their less rigidly framed aesthetic allowed for expansive expression without limitations. The use of proportion, line, color, material, and subject matter were all played with, reorganized, and thus recreated according to the experimentation of the Cubist aesthetic.