By that time Picasso had already discovered African wooden sculpture in the ethnographic museum at the Palais du Trocadero and, like many other artists, had bought several statues and masks. For him these were not only works of incredible outward expressiveness, works in which others sought to find an explanation for his innovations. André Malraux cites Picasso as saying: “Their forms had no more influence on me than they did on Matisse or Derain. For them, though, the masks were sculptures like all others. When Matisse showed me his first African head, he spoke to me of Egyptian art.”[10] Picasso, however, immediately saw in them magical objects with their own artistic idioms. And the discovery of African art staggered him by its correspondence to his own deeply personal attitude towards life, his own attitude towards creative work. Just as in the year before, the desire for self-realisation had led Picasso to prehistoric Iberian sculpture, now the irrational, superstitious side of his complex nature led him to grasp the universal goals of art through the magical figures of spirits. During the autumn of 1907 the artist spent long hours carving strange, fetish-like figurines and primitive dolls and making sketches for future sculptures (see drawings and engravings). He was not alone in this passion, for Derain as well was occupied with carving at that time. Unlike Derain’s wooden sculptures, however, those of Picasso bore not a hint of decorativeness. These were indeed fetish figurines, and they exude something grave, threatening, dramatic. The same figurines became the characters of his paintings near the beginning of 1908.

Picasso approached the subject as a sculptor, saying, “When it comes to paintings [. . .], it would be enough to dissect them—colours, after all, being no more than the indications of different perspectives—then reassemble them according to the indications given by colour, in order to find yourself in the presence of a ‘sculpture’. The dead painting would not be missed”[11]: if painting is always an illusion, something projected onto a screen, sculpture is always an objective reality, the image of the sculpture being present in the character of the object-thing.

The reason for, and meaning of, Picasso’s proto-Cubism are normally explained as the artist’s desire to radically simplify his pictorial vision of the objective world, to strip away the layers of illusion and reveal its constructive physical essence. It is usual in this context to cite the famous words Cézanne wrote in a letter addressed to the artist Émile Bernard that was published in the autumn of 1907: “Treat nature by means of cylinder, sphere, cone.” Another of the generally assumed points of departure for so-called proto-Cubism is the African influence, which introduced simplification of anatomy and other expressive features. The combination of these two diametrically opposed influences—Cézanne’s “perceptualised” art and black Africa’s “conceptualised” art—is usually employed to explain the stylistic phenomenon of proto-Cubism as an art entirely preoccupied with the problem of space.