Proto-Cubism that Metzinger was the first to recognize explicitly and implicitly the significance of the use of "a free, mobile perspective", and the "mixing... of the successive and the simultaneous". He was the first to write of the fact that artists had abandoned traditional perspective and were now free to move around their subjects to paint them from various points in space, and at various moments in time. Metzinger's role at center of Cubism both as a painter and theorist prompted Guillaume Apollinaire to write of Picasso, Braque and Metzinger as the first three Cubist painters. Now well beyond the teachings
Cubism Villon exhibited seven important and large drypoints, while his brother Marcel Duchamp shocked the American public with his painting "Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2" (1912). Francis Picabia exhibited his abstractions "La Danse à la source" and "La Procession, Seville" (both of 1912). Albert Gleizes exhibited "La Femme aux phlox" (1910) and "L'Homme au balcon" (1912), two highly stylized and faceted cubist works. Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Roger de La Fresnaye and Alexander Archipenko also contributed examples of their cubist works. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Europeans were discovering African, Polynesian, Micronesian and Native American