Picasso grew up with the influence from traditional Spanish art, and in his early twenties, he moved to Paris and quickly absorbed the expressive French palette.9 In 1906, Picasso became interested in primitive looking imagery. After viewing the 1906 Salon D' Automne exhibition for Gauguin, Picasso was inspired to do a number of wood carvings.² It was Henri Matisse who introduced Picasso to African sculpture. He was fascinated by the demonic and magical qualities they produced.² Picasso's painting, Two Nudes, emphasizes the large structural qualities along with the distorted proportions seen in African art. Braque visited Picasso in his studio and admired his work and began following his style of fragmentation and together initiated the movement that would bring them much recognition for years to come.

        Both artists were greatly inspired by the Post-Impressionist painter, Paul Cézanne. His later work tended to defy the logic of space and gravity.9 However, the Cubists pushed the distortion in their subjects to a much higher level making it more fragmented. Picasso and Braque followed the advice of Cézanne, who in 1904 said that artists should treat nature "in terms of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone.8" The Impressionist movement was the first to break down the subject matter and conventional space in its most true form.10 The Cubists continued this break down of illusion of space by focusing on the three-dimensional space and by the elimination of one, single perspective.