"Years later he [ Picasso ] would tell the French writer [w:André Malraux|André Malraux] of something else that shaped his Demoiselles [made in Paris, June-July 1907]. Matisse had shown him an African statue he'd bought. Then Picasso went to the dingy ethnographic museum in Paris, the 'Trocadero', with its collection of primitive artifacts. It smelled like a flea market, but it opened his eyes to the magic of masks and fetishes. 'If you give spirits a shape, you break free from them', he said, [and]: 'Suddenly.. .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.. ..because it was my first exorcising picture.'"
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Paul Trachtman, "Matisse & Picasso" (with quotes from the 1940's), Smithsonian Magazine, February 2003, p. 4.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Henri_Matisse
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Henri Matisse
Henri Émile Benoît Matisse (31 December 1869 – 3 November 1954) was a French artist. Particularly known for his striking use of colour, Matisse is one of the very few indisputable giants of modern art, alongside Pablo Picasso and Wassily Kandinsky.
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