There’s a strongly Surrealist feel to two portraits of women in armchairs, their faces, arms and curves reduced to floating, rock-like forms. But Picasso’s signature approach during 1932 involves abstracting the human form into flat areas of colour with a bright, heraldic immediacy, in which the sitter’s features – invariably Walter’s – remain clearly recognisable.Walter looks out at us from Reading, her body a jumble of breasts, belt and looping arms, her face flattened into a lunar sphere. But Picasso becomes increasingly obsessed with watching her asleep, absorbed – we surmise – in rapturous, post-coital dreams. In The Dream she’s dropped off in a chair, her blouse falling from her shoulder, but none of her clothes remain in the half dozen paintings that form the core of the exhibition, completed in just 12 days in early March of this extraordinary year.