What greatly attracted me – and it was the main line of advance of Cubism – was how to give material expression to this new space of which I had an inkling. So I began to paint chiefly still life's, because in nature there is a tactile, I would almost say a manual space. I wrote about this moreover 'When a still-life is no longer within reach, it ceases to be a still-life...'. For me that expressed the desire I have always had to touch a thing, not just to look at it. It was that space that attracted me strongly, for that was the earliest Cubist painting – the quest for space.

p. 264 - 'In conversation with Dora Vallier' (1954)