Three reclining nudes, inspired by one of Picasso’s most famous lovers, Marie-Thérèse Walter, are to be reunited for the first time in 85 years in an exhibition at Tate Modern.

The three paintings, which were described by Tate Modern director Frances Morris as “sensual, seductive and beautiful”, will be the centrepiece of the gallery’s first solo Picasso show, which will focus on just one formative year of the artist’s life – 1932.

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In that year, when he had just turned 50, Picasso had his first major retrospective looking back over his career, held in Paris and Zurich. While it was widely panned at the time, it was the show that confirmed his status as the “leader of the avant-garde, at the forefront of the progressive art movement,” said Nancy Ireson, who will co-curate the Tate exhibition.

It was also this retrospective that introduced Walter to the public, as she featured in many of the works. Picasso, who was married at the time to Olga Khokhlova and had a son, Paulo, had met Walter around 1927 when she was 17, having spotted her distinctive profile in the streets of Paris. The pair began an affair that he kept secret until 1932. In 1935 she gave birth to his daughter, though by this time he had moved on to his next lover, Dora Maar. Walter killed herself in 1977.

The show’s curators admitted that Picasso’s relationship with Walter was “tricky”, she having got together with him when she was under 18 and while he was a powerful, wealthy 45-year-old.

Picasso was notorious for having lots of lovers, but his artworks depicting those women are among his most revered paintings. Addressing the tendency of art history to romanticise such affairs, co-curator Achim Borchardt-Hume said: “The nature of their relationship is quite tricky to class, because of course her being kept a secret means she is absent from the archives.

“The little bit we know about her, when she spoke herself – which is not published – she said that a vital priority of their relationship is that Picasso looked at her, that for the first time in her life there was somebody who saw her. But obviously it is a tricky one. She was this romantic idea while he was in this very troubled relationship with his wife.”

The exhibition will take visitors through 1932, month-by-month, tracing the pivotal paintings, sculptures and works on paper he made that year. Works on display wills includes famous paintings such as Girl Before A Mirror, usually displayed at MoMA, and The Dream, which depicts Walter in a reverie and has never been exhibited in the UK.

The three sexually charged reclining nudes were all painted consecutively in a “burst of creativity” for Picasso over a period of just 10 days. The works are now in private collections and have not been seen together since his retrospective in 1932.

“These are three truly, absolutely extraordinary paintings,” said Borchardt-Hume. “There was a real recognition that this was a moment of departure and with the retrospective coming up, Picasso knew that the stakes were high and that he had to give it his all.”

These pivotal works were all painted at Picasso’s vast but dilapidated country house in Boisgeloup, and a room in the exhibition will be dedicated to capturing the atmosphere of that influential place. While they are widely acknowledged to have been inspired by his passionate love affair with Walter, she did not sit for the paintings, and they were done from Picasso’s imagination.

Morris said: “It is an extraordinary, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see these works together, the dialogue, as the creativity unfolded day by day.”

Morris, who took over as Tate Modern director last year, spoke about how her focus as director was to introduce a greater gender and geographical basis to exhibitions. Asked whether she would consider Picasso, a man who once said there were “only two kinds of women; goddesses and doormats,” to be a feminist, she said: “Extremely unlikely.”

However, she said that redressing the gender balance at Tate was not just about putting on 50% of shows by female artists, or artists that could be classed easily as feminists, and said that this was still a “very contemporary show”.

Borchardt-Hume said the issue of Picasso and feminism was one they had discussed during the development of the show. “There is the strange statement by Picasso where he says ‘I am a woman,’” he said. “Picasso talks about the relationship between gender and painting and what it is you try to do when you paint and partly how you try to escape the limitations of your own gender.

“So was he feminist in the political sense? No. But has he a key interest in his own sex, sexuality, that of the women he is with and how we relate? Yes.”

• The EY Exhibition: Picasso 1932 – Love, Fame, Tragedy will be at Tate Modern from 8 March until 9 September 2018