The Gaud-Toque scandal was eventually hushed up but there were fierce debates in the Chamber of Deputies and a widespread sense of public outrage, Anti-colonial societi were promoted and remained active until 1910 or later. At one of their meetings Pierre Quillard, whom Picasso knew, made a remarkable speech in which he never conde scended or pitied the Africanstut asked his brothers of another skin and another color to please forgive us for the crimes we have committed against them Quillard, like several of Picasso friends, was a declared anarchist and although Picasso does not seem ever to have committed himself at any rate politically, he was as open to the appeal of anarchism as they were. For it was e anarchist cultivatio experience for its own sa that attracted artists and intellectu The great interest suddenly taken by Picasso and his anarchist friends in dark continent and African artik motivated in this way: it was a Tadical avant-garde gesture, a provocative and Tot simply an appreciative, still less an aesthetic, response Picasso's intimate involvement is illustrated by a photograph of hinn 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 end Child quite clearly based on a traditional Madonna and Child 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 ave been thought in 19o7 a crude and brutalizing African mam of painting, evoking associations of tribal magic, superstition, irrationality, dark- ness and horror, was amummis anarchic gesture. It exploited a familiar anarchic suralegy inversion to equalize and level the-savage with the Picasso was never very forthcomin bout African art and what it had meant to him. But in 1937 he gave to the writer André Malraux an unusually candid account of his first visit to the Ethnographical Museum me 30 years previously. Every detail was imprinted on his memory as had happened the previous day. was all alone. wanted to getaway. But didnt ve. stayed, Lunderstood-that it was very important, he told Malraux. "The sks were Not at al They were magic things. They were against everything - against unknow,threatening spirits.