Such a life has not unnaturally cast a long shadow over the immense literature on the art. Even as rigorous an art historian and curator of major Picasso exhibitions as the late William S. Rubin, sometime director of the Department of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA, would speculate at length as to whether the Metropolitan’s beautiful neoclassical Woman in White (1923) was really a portrait of Sara Murphy, wife of Gerald Murphy, gifted painter, a glittering light in American expatriate society in France, and the model for Dick Diver in Tender Is the Night (1934). (See how easily and glibly one is led on in biographical asides.)

It is precisely ‘the horrible penumbra of gossip and hero worship’ that T.J. Clark, the leading British art historian of modernity, despises in his austere and challenging account of Picasso’s art. Originally, Picasso and Truth was given as the 2009 Andrew Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Clark is a virtuoso of the podium. The book gains much of its momentum and expository force from its origin as lectures. Hardly a reference to Picasso’s life and times escapes from this intense scrutiny of him from around 1920 to Guernica in 1937. Clark sets himself the task of revealing the truth locked inside some of the major works of the interwar years. To get at the idea of truth-in-painting, he deploys the hammerheads of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein.

Normally when art critics and historians invoke those two names, one heads for the exit to avoid the intellectual window dressing. Not so with Clark. Early on, he identifies two poles in Picasso’s art of substance and structure, drawing the distinction from two small and easily overlooked works, a nearly abstract cubist gouache of 1920 and an immensely powerful close-up of Fingers and Face. In the same breath he quotes appositely from the Tractatus: ‘Objects are what is unalterable and subsistent; their configuration is what is changing and unstable.’

In a post-Cézannian world where truthfulness to nature lost its purpose and meaning as a goal in art, it fell to Picasso and others to create works of art that possessed the substance and structure once found in nature. Cubism found the way of encompassing the world – the quotidian world of café and studio with its still-life props, occasional model or sitter – which went beyond verisimilitude or simple ‘likeness’. Clark quotes Picasso to good effect on his Cubist years:

We were passionately preoccupied with exactitude. We can only paint out of a view of reality, which we tried through dogged hard work (how we applied ourselves to this side of things!) to analyse in pictorial terms … How anxious we were lest something slip through our clutches.

The concern in that final phrase attests to Picasso’s and Braque’s belief that they were painting the truth. To let ‘something slip through’ would falsify the work and the world. The objects or figures could only have the secure ring of truth if they could be disposed in a space or, more precisely and presciently for Clark, in a room.

Clark devotes his second lecture to the presence of the room in Picasso, particularly the late-flowering cubism of the 1920s. The room represents the centre of the bourgeois – ‘Rooms, interiors, furnishings, covers, curlicues are the “individual” made flesh.’ The room is where the viewer enters imaginatively into the world of the painting. ‘Never was painting more in love with nearness, touch, familiarity, the world on a table.’ More often than not, Picasso’s rooms in the big cubist machines have windows like those in the Guggenheim’s superb Guitar and Mandolin on a Table, admired by Clark and the subject of extended analysis. They mark the invitation of the world to flow into the vivid, constructed room of the painting. ‘One way or another, the world must enter the room.’ But the world can only flow into the room if the latter is sufficiently and arrestingly articulated, imagined, and realised. Clark makes one far more aware than hitherto of Picasso’s effort and ingenuity creating these rooms. The proximity of the objects to the viewer – musical instruments, busts, fruit bowls, baked cakes, slices of melon – guarantees their truthfulness to experience, both the artist’s and ours. 

Mandolin and Guitar (Mandoline et guitare), Juan-les-Pins, 1924. Oil with sand on canvas, 55 3/8 × 78 7/8 inches (140.7 × 200.3 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 53.1358. © 2013 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

So much for the Apollonian muse of cubism. Clark elegantly notes that ‘Picasso is the artist of the shrieking girl and the silent mandolin.’ The Nietzschean element is as potent as the Wittgensteinian. The big talk with Nietzsche is what does the artist believe in a post-Christian world where the unrealised beliefs have been knocked away. Clark, in a telling passage, notes that ‘Nietzsche was fond of quoting Pascal, who said that without God – without Christianity – “you, no less than nature and history, will become for yourselves un monstre et un chaos”. Nietzsche saw the danger but embraced it: so, I think, did Picasso.’

The fourth lecture, ‘Monster’, is one of the most compelling and difficult in what is never an easy book. Clark takes a large but relatively obscure work, Painter and Model (1927); obscure because it now resides in the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art and is rarely seen in the West. (What do the mullahs make of it?) Here the cubist room has an oppressive, prison-like effect. The figures are trapped in a windowless room, lit by erratic gashes of light. After close examination of two sketchbooks in the Musée Picasso, Clark elicits from these bodiless wraiths that the idea, even the act, of castration informs the painting. Picasso prised the painting out of the torrential furore of the sketchbooks with their bloody and violent acts. It is a painting beyond morality, un monstre et un chaos.

The paintings of the 1920s in which the model is shown as a monster with savage teeth in her mouth – and elsewhere – have conventionally been interpreted as Picasso’s anguished and angry depiction of his wife and their rapidly disintegrating marriage. Clark will, of course, have nothing of this, and it leads him to a misstep. For all his dismissal and contempt of this approach – ‘biography is banality or speculation’ – he is surely wrong to ascribe the sexual frenzy of Painter and Model to Picasso’s newfound lover and muse in the youthful Marie-Thérèse Walter. When Clark suggests that in a tender drawing of her asleep, where her hands cradle her face, they resemble ‘the monster woman’s great holding aloft of her snout’, his ideology is surely betraying his eye.

The last lecture on Guernica is the finest in the book, not only because Clark brings fresh insights and readings to this well-cultivated field on the Picasso Estate, but also because he and the reader come up for air in a wider historical context. He summarises succinctly the events surrounding the painting. In the late afternoon of 26 April 1937, for more than two hours, the Luftwaffe, aided by Italian fascist planes, bombed and strafed the ancient market town and capital of the Basque region. It was an experiment to see how the explosives would reduce a town to rubble and the effect it would have on ‘civilian morale’. ‘Guernica was inaugural. It ushered in the last century’s and our century’s “war on terror”.’ Death came from the sky without warning.

Picasso painted his masterpiece – the threnody of the century – within a month of the event. Clark is particularly good on the importance and impact of the painting’s outsize scale: twenty-five feet long by more than eleven and a half high. It cannot be taken in at a glance. As we explore the work incident to incident, the atrocity of the act is on the surface. ‘He wanted proximity but not intimacy.’ Much of the painting happens over our head where we see the edges of buildings and the blinding light of the barely shaded tungsten light bulb – the simulacrum of the exploding bombs. Inside and outside are conflated: we seem to be in a square lit by a domestic light. Picasso fashions a room space, compressing and entangling woman, children, and beasts into a screaming mess of fear and flame.

The truth that Clark has so relentlessly pursued over the course of his lectures irradiates his own book. The experience is bracing, an end point and a turning point in the study of the century’s presiding genius.