“Those masks were not just pieces of sculpture like the rest. Not in the least. They were magic. And why weren’t the Egyptians or the Chaldees? We hadn’t understood what it was really about: we had seen primitive sculpture, not magic. These Negroes were intercessors — that’s a word I’ve known in French ever since then. Against everything: against unknown, threatening spirits. I kept staring at these fetishes. Then it came to me — I too was against everything. I too felt that everything was unknown, hostile! Everything! Not just this and that but everything, women, children, animals, smoking, playing . . . Everything! I understood what their sculpture meant to the blacks, what it was really for. Why carve like that and not in any other way? After all, they were not Cubists. Because Cubism did not exist . . . all these fetishes were for the same thing. They were weapons. To help people not to be ruled by spirits anymore, to be independent. Tools. If you give spirits a shape, you break free from them. Spirits and the subconscious (in those days we weren’t yet talking about the subconscious much) and emotion — they’re all the same thing. I grasped why I was a painter. All alone in that museum, surrounded by masks, Red Indian dolls, dummies covered with dust. The “Demoiselles” must have come that day: not at all because of their forms, no; but because it was my first exorcising picture — that’s the point.”
–Pablo Picasso, about his exposure to African sculpture and its influence upon him.
