Clark can riff endlessly on Picasso's shattered forms. "The idea of ‘in front of' especially interests me. How far in front? Gaining what from the proximity? Inside or out? These are the painting's questions." Perhaps what interests him most about Picasso is the ambiguity in the pictures, because it leaves so much space for riffing. All this riffing confuses Clark's arguments, and he tends to lose his aim just as he comes to his point. For example, one of Picasso's paintings "challenges us to resist its inventiveness, but does it not at the same time admit its own forced quality — its theatricality, its framed and concocted stunts?" It may do, I suppose. But then this could easily be asserted about any other painting ever. Strangely, it is often in his most emphatic moments that Clark is least precise. When he escapes from his tangle of concepts and conceits, he sometimes stumbles into extraordinarily banal conclusions. At the end he declares that "there is one thing painting finds indispensable: namely, space". Did that need to be argued?

There are platitudes, but there are insights too. Coincidentally or not, Clark's book is effective rather like a Cubist painting: the overall picture it gives is fragmented and obscure, frustrating our approach; and yet it promises real depth. And its actual subject is not what it so obliquely yet fervently describes; Clark is using Picasso in his own curious attempt, as a disappointed Marxist — or "socialist atheist" as he calls himself in this book — to represent the last century. He implores us to ask ourselves: "So what is modern art but a long refusal, a long avoidance of catastrophe, a set of spells against an intolerable present?" (But I wonder if modern art might not come to be seen as the most terrible sign of the catastrophe, the fantasy of that intolerable present.) Picasso and Truth should stand as a brilliant example of how 20th-century man could think. It is as much the anthropological document as was Picasso's art. Clark turns out to be a "post-Truth" writer.