Sweet dreams are made of this

This triumphant and gripping show of more than 100 works from the most creative year of Picasso’s career shows him at a personal and artistic crossroads EXHIBITION OF THE WEEK PICASSO 1932 — LOVE, FAME, TRAGEDY

TATE Modern’s Picasso extravaganza, Picasso 1932 — Love, Fame, Tragedy, concentrates on his output for that single year. If the backstory is predictable — older man has affair with woman half his age (in fact, when they first met she was a minor) — it is also compelling since he was the most famous artist in the world at the time, and a lot was going on besides seedy nookie.

When he painted the show’s strange little opening image in which a diagrammatic woman stabs a female rival with a dagger, Picasso was 50. His affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter had been going on for five years and he had been famous for half his life. He went around in a chauffeur-driven car. He lived in grand apartments in Paris: a chaotic one upstairs where he painted and a bourgeois one below to receive exalted guests. He must have had a sense, like anyone else, of a tragic phase of world history about to unfold.

As the Great Depression was under way, there was mass unemployment. Populist nationalism was on the rise and the beginnings of totalitarian regimes were visible in Italy and Germany. He was at a crossroads of a kind, and from this pressure came paintings and sculptures, done in a very short period, that match anything he did in a long and provocative career.

For the sake of the affair that started up between him and Walter when he was 45 and she was 17, he paid for an

Tate Modern, SE1 apartment for her near his home — he got his art dealer to set it up. Close male friends knew about his secret life and colluded with it but for eight years he successfully hid it from his first wife, Olga Khokhlova, the Russian ballet dancer and mother of his son.

Now it was 1932 and he was worried about his status: did it rely on past achievements? In portrait after portrait of Walter he attempted to sum up and synthesise his own artistic ideas. They were not done with the model in front of him (he hardly painted anything directly from life in his whole career) but she is clearly recognisable. Comparing the art with photos of Walter, we can always tell it’s her. It might seem astonishing but whenever Olga came across any of these artworks — remember: she’s the one he’s married to — she understood them to be purely artistic experiments, his exploration of a classical ideal of female beauty, and not pictures of someone he really knew. They are both, in fact. Typically, he