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Picasso was still alive when Berger wrote this book. He had already been a legend for decades, and his works were selling for amounts that seemed to Berger obscene, to us now, quaint. Berger doesn't use the term "celebrity" but he might as well. Picasso has an entourage of acolytes and flatterers. Already right after WWII he was able to buy a chateau with the proceeds from one still-life.

Critically, Picasso was a child prodigy. When he was 14, Picasso's father, an art teacher, gave him his palette and brushes and vowed never to paint again because the boy had surpassed him already. Berger notes:

"Child prodigies in the visual arts are much rarer than in music and, in a certain sense, less true. The boy Mozart probably did play as finely as anybody else alive. Picasso at sixteen was not drawing as well as Degas. The difference is perhaps due to the fact that music is more self-contained than painting. The ear can develop independently: the eye can only develop as fast as one's understanding of the objects seen.....[the prodigy] does things without understanding why or the reasoning behind them. He obeys what is the equivalent of an instinctual desire."

In Berger's view the most important period of Picasso's life, when he had the most artistic successes, was his Cubist period. In this period, Picasso developed as an artist, something Berger says did not happen at any other time of his life. (I thought of Mendelssohn when I read this. He too was a child prodigy, yet he was a composer who more or less stopped developing at a fairly young age. Contrast him to Beethoven or someone similar to Beethoven, who had early, middle and late periods, with increasing complexity of composition, and increasing development as an artist.) Berger distinguishes Picasso from Juan Gris, an artist who "believes in the intellect" (Picasso doesn't); Gris's paintings develop, "Picasso's paintings, however much they may appear to change, remain essentially what they were at their beginning."

Apart from the Cubist years, Picasso failed to develop because "he has not been open to explanations, suggestions, or arguments. Instead he has had to rely more and more exclusively upon the mystery of his own prodigious creativity.....Picasso's being a child prodigy has increased and prolonged the effect and influence of his early years. The power of his genius, in which he had to trust, became a barrier against outside influences, and even a barrier against any conscious plans of his own. He submitted to its will - in an eternal present. He stayed young."

For Berger Cubism, which took place from 1907 to 1914, was hugely important - as revolutionary in seeing things in a new way as the Renaissance. "Such a sense of newness has nothing to do with the artist's own originality. It has to do with the time in which he lives. More specifically it has to do with the possibilities suggested, with an awareness of promise - in art, life, science, philosophy, technology. ....it was far more than a stylistic revolt against what had preceded it. Cubism changed the nature of the relationships between the painted image and reality, and by doing this it placed man in a position which he had never been in before." Berger spends some time examining how Courbet and Cezanne in the 19th century were paving the way for Cubism.

So Picasso is advancing, developing, his art and his artistic vision with Cubism - and the source of his advancement has nothing to do "with the artist's own originality." For once he is relying not on his own genius but on aspects of the world outside himself. He provokes Cubism with the painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, says Berger, and Cubism is sustained by the other artists Braque, Derain, Léger, and the poet Apollinaire. With the onset of World War I, the group is broken up. "It was they, rather than [Picasso]," writes Berger, "who belonged to the modern world, and so were committed to it." Picasso goes back to relying on his innate genius. In this period he is painting caricatures of other artists and other styles, and pastiches which "are not as satisfying or profound as the originals, because there is a self-conscious division between their form and content. The way in which they are painted or drawn does not arise directly out of what Picasso has to say about his subject, but instead out of what Picasso has to say about art history."

Berger argues that Picasso's rootedness in the 19th century, and his "exile" from Spain, make him self-sufficient and isolate him. There is an existential loneliness whose effect on his art is that "he does not know what to paint...he will run out of subjects. He will not run out of emotion or feelings or sensations; but he will run out of subjects to contain them."

Berger's argument is more detailed and sophisticated than I can go into here but its basis is that an artist needs contact with the outside world and resistance from the outside world in order to find subjects and other realities that exist outside his own awareness and his own creativity. Picasso's art became mannered because he lacked subjects outside himself, his own style, and his own art. When he imitates Velazquez' great painting Las Meninas, he "empties it of its own content, and then is unable to find any of his own."