<P> Around 1906, Picasso met Matisse through Gertrude Stein, at a time when both artists had recently acquired an interest in Tribal art, Iberian sculpture and African tribal masks . They became friendly rivals and competed with each other throughout their careers, perhaps leading to Picasso entering a new period in his work by 1907, marked by the influence of ethnographic art . Picasso's paintings of 1907 have been characterized as proto - Cubism, as Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, the antecedent of Cubism . </P> <P> The African influence, which introduced anatomical simplifications and expressive features, is another generally assumed starting point for the Proto - Cubism of Picasso . He began working on studies for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon after a visit to the ethnographic museum at Palais du Trocadero . Pierre Daix, explored Picasso's Cubism from a formal position in relation to the ideas and works of Claude Lévi - Strauss on the subject of myth . Without doubt, writes Podoksik, Picasso's proto - Cubism--coming as it did not from the external appearance of events and things, but from great emotional and instinctive feelings, from the most profound layers of the psyche--clairvoyantly (as Rimbaud would have said) arrived at the suprapersonal and thereby borders on the archaic mythological consciousness ." </P> <P> European artists (and art collectors) prized these objects for their stylistic traits defined as attributes of primitive expression: absence of classical perspective, simple outlines and shapes, presence of symbolic signs including the hieroglyph, emotive figural distortions, and the dynamic rhythms generated by repetitive ornamental patterns . These were the profound energizing stylistic attributes, present in the visual arts of Africa, Oceana, the Americas, that attracted the Parisian avant - garde . </P> <P> The works of Paul Gauguin had achieved center stage in the avant - garde circles of Paris following the powerful posthumous retrospective exhibitions at the Salon d'Automne in 1903 and 1906 . Picasso's paintings of monumental figures from 1906 were directly influenced by the paintings, sculptures and writings of Gauguin . The savage power evoked by Gauguin's work lead directly to Les Demoiselles in 1907 . According to Gauguin biographer David Sweetman, Picasso became an aficionado of Gauguin's work in 1902 when he befriended the expatriate Spanish sculptor and ceramist Paco Durrio in Paris . Durrio, both a friend of Gauguin's and an unpaid agent of his work, had several of Gauguin's works on hand, in an attempt to help his poverty - stricken friend in Tahiti by promoting his oeuvre in Paris . </P>

Sculpture that is tied to the background from which it only partially emerges is termed