it was a radical avant-garde gesture, a provocative and not simply an appreciative, still less an aesthetic, response. Picasso's intimate involvement is illustrated by a photograph of him in 1908 in his Paris studio taken by an American writer, Gelett Burgess, who published it in 1910 in an article entitled 'The Wild Men of Paris'. For this Picasso posed himself surrounded by his African and Oceanic sculptures( 19.6 ). The previous year he had painted a wilder and even more provocative work than Les Demoiselles, a small painting he entitled Mother and Child quite clearly based on a traditional Madonna and Chlid composition, complete with halo and the blue robe of heaven that the Madonna traditionally wears (19.7 ). The transformation of such an easily and immediately recognizable white man's holy icon through what would have been thought in 1907 a crude and brutalizing African manner of painting, evoking association of tribal magic, superstition, irrationality, darkness and horror, was an unmistakably anarchic strategy of inversion to equalize and level the 'savage' with the 'civilized'.Picasso was never very forthcoming about had meant to him. But in 1937 he gave to the writer Andre Malraux an unusually candid account of his first visit to the Ethnographical Museum some 30 years previously. Every detail was imprinted on his memory as if it had happened the previous day. 'I was all alone. I wanted to get away. But I didn't leave. I stayed, I understood that it was very important', he told Malraux. 'The masks weren't just like any other pieces of sculpture. Not at all. They were magic things....They were against everything - against unknown, threatening spirits. I always looked at fetishes. I understood; I too am against everything....Spirits, the unconscious ( people still weren't talking about that very much ), emotion - they're all the same thing. I understood why I was a painter. All alone in that awful museum, with masks, dolls made by the redskins, dusty mannikins. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon must have come to me that very day, but not at all because of the forms; because it was my first exorcism-painting - yes absolutely!'