[twic]

I facepalmed at "Imagine if when Picasso was learning to paint, we told him what style he should paint in. Would we have cubism?". The answer is not only yes, but yes, and that is exactly what happened.

This is the style Picasso was told to paint in when he was learning to paint:

http://mesosyn.com/pp-early.html

It was only after he had mastered this conventional style of painting that he went on to discover cubism.