Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque

The idea began in 1907, in a warren of cheap artists' studios known as the "Bateau-Lavoir" or "Laundry Boat" at 13 Rue Ravignan in Paris. It was touched off by a Spaniard, Pablo Picasso, then aged twenty-six. His partner in inventing Cubism was a younger and rather more conservative Frenchman, Georges Braque, the son of a housepainter in Normandy.

Picasso and Braque wanted to represent the fact that our knowledge of an object is made up at all possible views of it: top, sides, front, back. They wanted to compress this inspection, which takes time, into one moment - one synthesized view. They aimed to render that sense of multiplicity, which had been the subtext of Cezanne's late work, as the governing element of reality.

One of their experimental materials was the art of other cultures. With their appropriation of forms and motifs from African art, Picasso and then Braque brought to its climax a long interest which nineteenth-century France had shown in the exotic, the distant, and the primitive.

African masks as curios.

Both he and Braque owned African carvings, but they had no anthropological interest in them at all. They didn't care about their ritual uses, they knew nothing about their original tribal meanings (which assigned art a very different function to any use it could have in Paris), or about the societies from which the masks came.

But then, why use African art at all? The Cubists were just about the first artists to think of doing so.

Yet this was what Picasso did with his African prototypes, around 1906-8. When he began to parody black art, he was stating what no eighteenth-century artist would ever have imagined suggesting: that the tradition of the human figure, which had been the very spine of Western art for two and a half millennia, had at last run out; and that in order to renew its vitality, one had to look to untapped cultural resources - the Africans, remote in their otherness. But if one compares a work like Picasso's Les Demoiselles d' Avignon, 1907, with its African source material, the differences are as striking as the similarities. What Picasso cared about was the formal vitality of African art, which was for him inseparably involved with its apparent freedom to distort. That the alterations of the human face and body represented by such figures were not Expressionist distortions, but conventional forms, was perhaps less clear (or at least less interesting) to him than to us. They seemed violent, and they offered themselves as a receptacle for his own panache. So the work of Picasso's so-called "Negro Period" has none of the aloofness, the reserved containment, of its African prototype; its lasting rhythms remind us that Picasso looked to his masks as emblems of savagery, of violence transferred into the sphere of culture.