Can Marxism Explain the Genius of Picasso?
This is the sort of question that has always been thrown at Marxist historians, and is intended to imply that Marxist history is obsessed with rigid economic causes, and cannot cope with real people. A Marxist historian would usually reply ‘no’ to the question, in the sense that individuals are all different and always have been; it is out of date to argue that people were simply created by their environments, as many theorists (from both the left and the right) argued in the first half of the twentieth century. Picasso had his own special talent as a painter which would have been his in any century, although the way he saw and developed painting came out of his particular training and experience in the 1900s and onwards – his painting would certainly have looked very different in 1500 or 1700. But the way Picasso lived as a painter can indeed be explained in Marxist terms, for he could not have lived like that in 1500 or 1700. Picasso was in a sense made possible by an art market; he
