Picasso in his swimming trunks. Now on show at the Tate

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Leading article: Love letters

In one room is a photograph of Picasso in his swimming trunks. In another is a letter that the sculptor Barbara Hepworth had written on the night of the fire at St Ives in which she died. The letter was soaked with water and carries the imprint of a fireman's shoe.

Look a little further and there is J M W Turner's palette. Near by is Paul Nash's paintbox, and the actual ribbon worn by the subject of Edgar Degas' celebrated sculpture, Little Dancer.

The archives and library of the Tate have been brought together, housed in a purposebuilt suite of rooms at Tate Britain in London, and from next month will be open to scholars and members of the public.

In addition to objects, photographs, manuscripts and diaries there is a wealth of letters from celebrated artists. Some are love letters, others detail arguments and splits in artistic alliances.

Tate Britain's new £2.2m Hyman Kreitman Research Centre, named after its donor, the late Hyman Kreitman, a former chairman of Tesco and son-in-law of the Tesco founder, Sir John Cohen, will house the collection of more than a million items in reading rooms, display areas and storage rooms in a converted former picture store.

Among the love letters is a correspondence between John Nash and Dora Carrington, members of the Bloomsbury Group. Their letters carry pictures of ducks to signify that they addressed each other as "duckie". There are also letters from Ben Nicholson to all three of his wives. And, poignantly, there are letters from Stanley Spencer to his wife, Hilda, which he continued writing not only after they were divorced, but even after she died. In a letter from 1955, five years after his wife's death, Spencer wrote that their love was "a wonderful desecration of most of the childhood hopes, because it is sexual and non- innocent, but it is grown-up".

Nash, in a letter in 1938 to his fellow artist Eileen Agar, both of whom were married, wrote: "Eileen, what have I done for you to treat me like this? I know it is all over!

"I knew that on Friday when you showed me so clearly and so often that you wanted to be with [the writer Paul] Eluard rather than me. I could share you with Joseph [her husband] because there was something you gave me, which was not for him. But I cannot share you with Eluard, because you have given him what was mine."

The archives also contain numerous papers and minutes of artistic societies. One is of the "7 & 5 Society", an exhibiting group of notable British painters and sculptors first formed in 1919.

Minutes from 1934 show two of the people standing for senior posts in the society were Winifred Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth. Ben Nicholson had just left Winifred for Hepworth. The minutes show Hepworth voted for Winifred, but Winifred did not vote for Hepworth.

Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate, said yesterday: "Research and scholarship lie at the heart of any museum. This scheme will bring together library and archive materials and make them more widely available."