Picasso dated this sheet in the upper left corner, in a large looping hand: “26 Août 41.” He was in Paris, in the studio on the rue des Grands-Augustins where he spent the Occupation, and that summer he returned again and again to the reclining nude. The studies ran from May to late September 1941. After a pause of some seven months they led to L’Aubade, the large canvas he painted very quickly in May 1942 and gave to the Musée national d’art moderne in 1947. The sequence, which Yve-Alain Bois has analysed, began in May as an odalisque in the manner of Matisse, Titian or Ingres. In August a second figure entered, a seated watcher beside the reclining woman. This sheet belongs to that month, yet it leaves the watcher out and works on the nude alone, three times in pencil.

The three bodies lie one above another across the buff sheet, each with its head at the left and its feet toward the right edge. The heads are the firmest passages in the drawing. Picasso builds each from a few large, overlapping loops in a heavier line and repeats it almost unchanged from figure to figure, with the features reduced to a few marks at its base. The bodies are handled differently. Their strokes are lighter, quicker and often broken, with patches of hatching at the groin, and the legs are restated several times. The middle figure is the fullest. Its contour runs unbroken from head to feet, what reads as an arm bends up behind the head, and the hip swings out in a full curve: the pose of the odalisque. Above and below it, the figures lie straighter and flatter, and in the lowest the legs trail off into zigzag notations.

Read against the painting, the sheet holds both possibilities. In L’Aubade the reclining woman has stiffened into a figure the Centre Pompidou likens to a tomb effigy, laid out flat with her hair hanging down. Here the middle study keeps the supple odalisque, while the two outer figures already lie closer to that effigy.

The pairing Picasso introduced that August had old sources. In Titian’s Venus with an Organ Player, which Picasso had seen at the Prado, the musician turns from his keyboard to look at the goddess. In Ingres’s Odalisque with a Slave (1839), a seated woman plays a stringed instrument beside the nude while a eunuch stands guard behind them. Picasso kept the arrangement and changed its terms. His musician became an angular guardian. In the final canvas the room was cleared of the bed frame, lamp and rug of the studies and became, in the Pompidou’s words, as dark as a prison.

The title under which the sheet is catalogued comes from the painting, which acquired it late. The canvas was first called La Sérénade, and the name L’Aubade is said to have come from Louis Aragon. An aubade is a song for daybreak, traditionally the hour when lovers part, and the Pompidou reads the picture as a dawn without light. The parenthesis naming Dora Maar needs similar care. Maar had been Picasso’s companion since 1936, and her features run through his wartime work. Kahnweiler remarked that all the women Picasso painted in those years looked like her. The sheet bears this out in its own way. Picasso draws the same looping head three times, close to a sign, while the bodies beneath it change.

Picasso later said that he had not painted the war, but that the war was undoubtedly present in the paintings he made then. L’Aubade was first exhibited at the Salon d’automne of 1944, the “Salon de la Libération,” and has stood since as a central image of his work under the Occupation. Its rapid execution in May 1942 depended on the drawings of the previous summer. This sheet shows the kind of work they did: one head held constant, and one body drawn three ways in a single day.