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This 1989 edition of the book includes a brief intro by the author explaining the book's initial reception in 1965 when its subject was still living; and a third chapter written in the '80s, after Picasso's death. In a way a response to the ineffectual hagiography that surrounded Picasso, Berger, a Marxist, attempts to explain the artist as a product of his place (feudal, anarchistic Spain), his time, his personal isolation as an exile and deified celebrity. Berger shows how Picasso's style was a new primitive expression, a rejection of intellectual analysis. His success was this creation, painting as stark emotional experience. His failures, Berger suggests, lay in several works that are rooted in nothing and are thus absurd; his acceptance of bourgeois values that offered nothing of substance; and his lack of originality in his later years. The essay is learned, if a bit erratic as it swerves from notion to notion; Berger's assessment of Picasso's '50s self-mocking drawings is especially good.