WHEN ANNE BALDASSARI entered the cluttered Paris apartment of reclusive artist and photographer Dora Maar, she walked into a time capsule that would cast new light on one of last century's most significant artists.
Maar was a hoarder. So in 1997, when Baldassari, director of the Musee Picasso in Paris, went to inventory Maar's archive after her death at the age of 90, she discovered a treasure trove: works and material by and about Pablo Picasso, whom Maar had loved during one of the 20th century's most tumultuous decades.
The museum bought much of Maar's archive, a dramatic addition to the works donated by Picasso's estate on his death in 1973, which led to the French government's creation of an institution devoted to his life and work.
Maar was raised in Argentina and was fluent in French and Spanish when she met the artist in the winter of 1935. She was beautiful, flamboyant, outspoken and sexually liberated. But in the final three decades of her life she chose to shut herself away in her Rue de Savoie apartment.
The treasures Baldassari found there included negatives recording her first meeting with Picasso, photos taken by each of them, poems he had written and details of a safe deposit vault to which Maar had moved his paintings.
Those works feature in a new exhibition from the Musee Picasso at Melbourne's National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), the only gallery outside Paris that has been given permission to stage it. Picasso: Love & War 1935-45 includes more than 350 works by Maar and Picasso, such as photos, prints, paintings and drawings - even pen and ink studies on the backs of envelopes.