"The price of presence, then, in a disintegrating bourgeois world, is brashness." I am not sure what the disintegrating bourgeois world has to do with it, but brashness is certainly how modern art has sustained itself. Cubism seemed to argue that "beauty and desirability in painting now stood in need of the grid and the monochrome if they were to be anything but Renoir kitsch". Perhaps Picasso adopted the argument because he noticed the kitsch in his "blue" and "rose" period works. But by now the argument seems feeble — an excuse. This will be modernism's lasting problem. So frightened of "bourgeois" kitsch, modern artists protected themselves from it with the yin to kitsch's yang: brutality, "cool". I hope that one day "cool" will become as toxic a concept as "kitsch". Kitsch was the 19th century's aesthetic disease; cool is the 20th century's aesthetic disease — still dangerous. 

Often the artists who feel themselves most susceptible to sentimentality choose to pursue brutal styles (I suspect this of Lucian Freud). "I don't find any face charming," lied Picasso. Clark reproduces a deft ink drawing of Marie-Therese's face in an unforced, traditionally figurative style — a private work — which shows Picasso to have been a blandly sweet observer of nature. Instead of confronting this weakness of his, Picasso blamed nature for it; he disdained observation, and he ridiculed nature by mutilating bodies and absurdly over-emphasising genitalia. "What is beauty anyway? There's no such thing." Such posturing can only be tedious now, and it makes it more difficult, in spite of that tremendous imagination, to take Picasso seriously.

Clark also worries about Picasso's reputation and his artistic legacy. Accepting, as we all can, Picasso's creative force, he asks: "But is origination greatness?" Clark rather fudges the answer. "Greatness is a dependency of Truth," and so, since Picasso's painting charts the crisis of Truth, he thinks the question should not be asked — Picasso's art stands as the disqualification of "greatness". But the question, I feel, remains crucial. Is Picasso's art, in all its styles and subjects, too private and too perverse? Or, to ask another way, is it — using Greenberg's formulation — too self-critical for us now? Too modernist? Can we ever enjoy it just as art if we disregard Picasso the phenomenon, artist of the century? 

Believing so much in Cubism, Clark — as far as I can discern — thinks that Picasso used pictorial form as more than an equivalence to reality: pictorial form would be reality's actual proof. With this Clark's speculative criticisms seem to coalesce into a jumbled allegory. He says his preoccupation is "Picasso's understanding of space, and therefore of history"; and his narrative takes a leap we may not want to follow. "Cubist space is Picasso's worldview. It is his interior — the depth he allows himself." Is he referring to physical space — bourgeois space — or pictorial space? Is it where Cubists painted or what they painted? Or the style in which they painted it? We cannot know; he will not distinguish. We may accept discussion of space in a picture as enabling the expression of a worldview; or discussion of the very achievement of a pictorial space, and its particular character, as demonstrative, or even symbolic, of a worldview; but I, at least, cannot accept pictorial space as the worldview itself. Clark takes the intelligible depth in a Cubist picture, or the very intelligibility of that depth, as precise measures of the painter's modern attitude. And he jumbles further. "Opacity" becomes "outwardness", which represents the escape from Bohemia. When Picasso's space constricts and his pictures flatten, it is to mean that "there is nothing behind the mask" — and so Picasso is made into Warhol. To paint Guernica Picasso had to "reinvent his whole worldview" (his style?), because, "How on earth was painting to represent such an ending without falling itself into a spatial rubble, a spatial nothing?"