QUOTE : After all, they were not Cubists. Because Cubism did not exist … all these fetishes were for the same thing. They were weapons. To help people not to be ruled by spirits anymore, to be independent. Tools. If you give spirits a shape, you break free from them. Spirits and the subconscious (in those days we weren’t yet talking about the subconscious much) and emotion—they’re all the same thing. 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: not at all because of their forms, no; but because it was my first exorcizing picture—that’s the point. “And that’s why later on I also painted pictures like the ones I had painted earlier on—Olga’s portrait, other portraits. You can’t be a witch-doctor all day long! How could you live? “That’s another thing that cut me off from Braque. He liked the Negroes, but as I’ve said because they were good sculpture. He was never just a little afraid of them. He was just not interested in exorcism. Because he never felt what I’ve called Everything, or life, or what shall I say—the World? Everything around us, everything that is not us: he never thought it hostile. Nor even strange: can you imagine that? He was always at home…. Still is, even now … he hasn’t the least notion of these things: he’s not superstitious.