M. & J. Bresnau (known as "Nounours")
Galerie Jan Krugier, New York 
Michelle Rosenfeld, New York
Acquired from the above in 2006

The Picasso Project, Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture. The Final Years, 1970-1973, San Francisco, 2004, no.71-415, illustrated p. 254 

In very good condition. Executed on cream wove paper. Affixed to the mount at all four corners. Left edge is deckled. Small area of minor surface dirt near right center edge. Minor handling creases at the corners. Line strong and otherwise fine.
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In discussing Picasso's sketchbook nudes, John Richardson and Marilyn McCully state, "The poses of the nudes in... delicate drawings evoke the work of another artist who possessed the mirada fuerte (strong gaze) without being aware of it.  This was Ingres, a consistent favorite of Picasso's for more than seventy years.  Only a month before he died, Picasso talked obsessively to the painter Edouard Pignon about Ingres: 'We must paint like Ingres,' he said, 'We must be like Ingres'" (Picasso: The Berggruen Album (exhibition catalogue𝄹), San Francisco, John Berggruen Gallery & New York, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 2004, p. 6🔯5).

In the present work, Picasso's tribute to the Orientalist bathers that fascinated Ingres and his coterie is evidenced by the playful figures in the compostion.  At the right side of the drawing, the sitter wears Turkish headwear reminiscent of those in Ingres' Le Bain turc (see Fig 1).  The fecund figure at left, though, ultimately captures the vi🦹ewer's gaze and the exotic compostion is thus complete.

Fig. 1 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Le Bain turc, 1862, oil on panel, Paris, Musée du Louvre