As summer comes along and I get a few minutes on a beach, invariably I think back to Picasso. For a while I was so immersed in his life and family working on a documentary, I wasn't able to fully sort out my feelings about the many women in his life whom he had tortured to one extent or another.

In 1920, he found the Villa Sables in Juan-les-Pins near Antibes, then a backwater, and he brought his very pregnant wife Olga with him to spend the summer. He took a lot of photographs of the two of them, mostly naked. Picasso found in the combination of sun and sand an aphrodisiac both for life and for painting for the next 50 years.

The nudes found their way into this contre-plaque (oil on wood) with its bathing beauties and odd perspectives. (PS Picasso could not swim! You always see him wading in the many photographs on the beach over the years)

This idyllic summer seems to have been a high point of his relationship with Olga. (Picasso loved his women most when they were pregnant. It proved his virility.) According to his biographer John Richardson, just before they went down south, he was likely visiting whorehouses in Paris (we can always tell by the art, he gave himself away over and over again). And when they returned to Paris, he completely neglected her and hid away many of the [works] he had done during the summer, almost as if to obliterate them from his memory. Olga was blindsided a few years later after the birth of their son Paulo by the advent of Marie-Therese (Picasso’s women are so famous they are known diminutively by their first names. He, of course, is always Picasso)

Baigneuses regardant un avion, 1920, Musee Picasso, Paris