Quotes of the Day

Monday is market day in the Basque town of Guernica, as it was on the afternoon of April 26, 1937, when the Junkers JU52 bombers of the Luftwaffe's Condor Legion arrived. For three hours high-explosive and incendiary devices fell on the town, whose narrow streets were packed with villagers and peasants from the surrounding countryside. Those who managed to flee the firestorm were hunted and strafed by Messerschmitt and Fiat fighter planes. A third of the town's 5,000 residents were killed, mostly children and old people; perhaps another thousand visitors died. Far from the front lines of the Spanish Civil War, which had begun the previous July, the town had no military importance. Its bombing was an exercise in terror. Nazi Germany's gift to Nationalist leader General Franco was also, as Luftwaffe commander Hermann Goering told the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal, "an opportunity to put my young air force to the test."

George Steer, a reporter for the London Times, filed a story the next day; soon news of the massacre had reached Paris. There, the Spanish painter Picasso was preparing a monumental commission for his native country's pavilion at the 1937 International Exhibition of Arts and Sciences. The outraged artist, never particularly passionate about politics, threw aside his planned work The Studio: the Painter and his Model, and began to create his masterpiece, a monochrome scream of pain and horror.

Beside him as he worked was a 29-year-old photographer, Dora Maar, herself an artist of some renown and a member of the Surrealist group. She and the 55-year-old Picasso had met 18 months earlier and become lovers; but they also met as artists. "You feel," says the director of the National Gallery of Victoria, Gerard Vaughan, "that of all the women in his life, Picasso treated her as an intellectual equal." There was collaboration and cross-pollination as Picasso absorbed and experimented with Maar's photographic techniques and she embraced painting

. She is also the subject of many of the portraits he made during their relationship. But what secures Maar's place in the history of 20th century art is the meticulous attention she paid to the execution of one of its greatest works. Throughout May and June of 1937, exploiting her intimate access to Picasso, Maar photographed the various stages in Guernica's evolution, detailing the revisions, amendments and rearrangement of the painting. In the process she made the first and most significant documentary record of the process of artistic creation. That collection of images is one of the highlights of the NGV's exhibition Picasso Love & War 1935-1945, in Melbourne until October 8.

The ten years Maar and Picasso spent together spanned the most tumultuous events of the century, and the passion of their liaison reflected them. The show captures it in detail, from courtship—Picasso's scrawling of her name over and over like a lovesick schoolboy, her coy note accompanying a photograph: "I found a portrait of myself and as I seem to remember you asked me for one, I am bringing it to you"— to the darker paintings that hint at its end. Maar was the primary model for the Weeping Woman series, eyes like basins pouring their tears for the misery of a world at war. Yet the viewer absorbs the impression that her highly strung temperament, as much as her physical substance, is sitting for the artist.

Above all, amid the romance and playfulness of the love affair and the artworks born of it, the 350 works on display here capture the fecundity of Picasso, and give an insight into the mechanics of genius. Here are the studies obsessively reworking an idea or theme, many of them threading though the painter's long life: classical mythology; the artist as minotaur or faun; the savage beauty of the bullfight. The same subject is painted over and over, and because Picasso dated his works precisely, the astonished visitor understands that half a wall of work is the output of just one day. There is lyrical beauty, puzzling abstraction, wit and color; and occasionally a startlingly realistic pencil portrait of Maar as a reminder of his consummate skills as a draughtsman.

Picasso's compulsion to create art was total, and it seems he saw everything as a potential canvas. That drive is illustrated by the inclusion in the exhibition of works on sheets of newspaper, inside books, on postcards, even on matchboxes. The range of his expression is bewildering, from sculpture to ceramics, exquisitely detailed etchings to the brilliant oils of popular imagination. Anne Baldassari, director of the Musée Picasso in Paris, has employed her intimate knowledge of both artists—on elegant display in the catalogue—to produce a model of the curator's craft, a delicate fusion of the accessible and the scholarly.

As the war ended, so did the couple's relationship. Perhaps the passion burned out; perhaps the hysteria of the Weeping Woman became too much for the artist to indulge. By 1946, Picasso had taken up with 25-year-old Françoise Gilot, whom he had met three years earlier; he offered Maar a house at Ménerbes in Vaucluse. They were to see each other only once more, at a friend's house in 1954. Picasso had almost 20 years of work left in him; Maar, by then a recluse, survived him by 24 years. When Baldassari was invited to catalogue the contents of Maar's Paris apartment after her death in 1997, she found it full of souvenirs of Picasso: paintings, drawings, notes, sculptures—even a scrap of paper bearing a brown stain, under which was written, in Maar's hand, "Sang de Picasso" (Picasso's blood). They were all, in Baldassari's words, "religiously preserved."

This captivating exhibition gives a sense of what drove Maar to that obsessive hoarding of memories; of the giddy, dangerous thrill of orbiting, touching—occasionally guiding—artistic genius in all its searing intensity. It was Maar's glorious tragedy, and our good fortune, that she flew so close to the flame.

• Steve Waterson
• Dora Maar was the artistic titan's collaborator and muse as well as his lover. A show at the National Gallery of Victoria vividly explores their interplay