Before examining that narrative, it is necessary to mention Clark's writing style. It can be defiantly inelegant. The average reader may struggle to continue past the suggestion that Picasso would come to turn Cubist space's "nearness to face us". Or: "[Interiors] . . . keep wildness and otherness within bounds: they allow them to be figured and drawn into a totality." He describes "a non-interior, but, just as much, a non-outside; a here in which all possible theres are suspended". Clark, like some other popular academics of his generation, is fond of these facile paradoxes, self-contradictions: "'Marie-Therese' is both there and not-there in the space provided . . ." From the same page: "The paintings in question destroy the I-figure at the same time they produce it." Such writing is a shame, not just in itself for asking such patience of us, but also because this should be a serious book. It need not have seemed so pretentious. The language disguises the thought, and at times even lays waste to it.

But if you persevere you may detect arguments of baffling scope. Picasso is "Nietzsche's painter", giving us "the most unmoral picture of existence ever pursued through a life". Clark wants to see Picasso's representations of space in parallel with, and explained by, Nietzsche's "crisis of Truth". "The will to truth" becomes, in Picasso's art, the will to pictorial space. The paintings illustrate the battle with scepticism. And more.

For Clark, Cubism was the "last effort in art at truth-telling". And he really believes in Cubism, finding in it "a claim to have gotten the structure of the world right in ways that no previous picturing had". "Space had a specific character in 1908 and 1915. Perhaps it had always had this character really and truly, but it seemed that certain possibilities of painting at this moment — and even of being-in-the-world at this moment — made the character newly accessible to consciousness." 

Even though he brings philosophy into this book, with Clark the history of art is always most important as an explanation of socio-political history. And Cubism came at what was, for him, a special moment. He enjoys surprising us with the assertion that Cubism was essentially "retrogressive". Bohemians like the young Picasso lived "instinctively within the limits of bourgeois society". Holed up in gloomy garrets, with wallpaper peeling and plasterwork crumbling, "they felt this society was coming to an end" and so they looked back on it, ironically, painting artefacts and personal objects — that is possessions, property. "Cubism was Bohemia's last hurrah", the last critique of the bourgeois world — that was its essential truth to tell.