As 1931 turned into 1932, Picasso was 50 years old, famous, rich and admired. His main home was a swish apartment in Paris but he also owned an 18th-century manor house at Boisgeloup in Normandy; he shuttled between the two in a chauffeur-driven Hispano-Suiza; he was married to the Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova, with whom he had a son, Paulo, and he had a mistress too, Marie-Thérèse Walter, then 22 but whom he had met when she was just 17. Both the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Venice Biennale wanted to stage a retrospective of his work but he had plumped for the Galeries George Petit in Paris and the show was to open in June. To cap it all, an early work, La Coiffure of 1905, sold for a record 56,000 francs in February.
So Picasso in 1932 had a rich, full life. But then, when didn’t he? Such was his emotional and artistic fecundity (he is said to have produced some 50,000 individual artworks during his career) that an enterprising curator could make an exhibition from pretty much any year of his career. Those at Tate Modern have gone for 1932 and tagged it his annus mirabilis.
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