T. J. Clark, George C. and Helen N. Pardee Chair and professor of history of art, University of California, Berkeley. Centered on a group of paintings by Picasso from the 1920s, a series of six lectures traces the artist's path to Guernica. In this audio podcast of the first lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on March 22, 2009, the renowned art historian and professor T. J. Clark discusses the sense of space epitomized by Picasso's The Blue Room, the artist's conception of the task of painting in the new century, and the relationships between his work and Friedrich Nietzsche's critique of Truth.