style="overflow: hidden; color: #000000; background-color: #ffffff; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; border: medium none;">How good was Picasso? The shaper and saviour of 20th-century painting, sure, but is that enough? One answer, says TJ Clark in this thrilling new reading, is that Picasso’s works themselves declare that greatness “no longer applies. It should not even be tried for. For greatness is a dependency of Truth.” In Picasso’s epoch of terror and totalitarianism, meaninglessness replaced absolute truth. By contrast, however much we may deplore the hierarchical or God-centred world views that produced a Velázquez or a Grünewald, we recognise in these artists “an account of the species in full”. Can 20th-century art reach such heights?