Many are familiar with the importance of African art on Western painting and sculpture of such artists as Picasso, Braque, Cezanne, Brancusi, Giacometti, Modigliani, and others. Like the artists of the early twentieth century, viewers often see African-influenced art from a Western perspective. For example, Picasso and Braque saw in African art, particularly in African masks, a radical new way of representing form. They would visit the Palais du Trocadéro in Paris which was the Museum of Ethnography between 1878-1935. Unlike art created in the West, African art had been created for particular functions: religious ceremonies, observances involving social status, and rites of passage. Picasso, like other modernist artists, had his own interpretation of African art and how it influenced his own work: “[I] examine[d] these masks, all those objects that people had created with a sacred and magical purpose, to serve as intermediaries between them and the unknown and hostile forces that surround them, thereby trying to overcome their fears, giving them color and shape. And then I understood what painting really meant. It is not an aesthetic process, it is a form of magic that stands between us and the hostile universe, a means of taking power, imposing a form on our terrors as well as our wishes, The day I understood that, I found my way.” In 1907, Picasso took what he learned from African art (as well as Iberian art), and painted the proto-Cubist masterpiece, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. African art was seminal to the birth of Cubism, even though Picasso’s interpretation of it suited his own artistic needs.