Art historians have demonstrated that the explosion of forms a la Picasso
was happening before and without the discovery of African Art sold to
European travelers. This does not mean that African masks and sculpturs
did not inspire some of the works during that time. Modernism, in French
poetry for example, includes the type of subjects, the disregard for
"classical" rules, thus much more than the influence of African arts
which was often a superficial borrowing of forms.