This tiny cartoon features one of Robert’s more complex compositions, showcasing his love of literature, cartoons and art history. The image strives for order and chaos at the same time.

The top sketch shows a party of women chatting over top of one another. Do the empty speech balloons mean their conversation is about nothing or is the artist still making up his mind about what to insert here? In the bottom sketch, a figure from Michelangelo appears in a lone speech balloon as Robert commits to illustrating T.S. Eliot’s line: “In the room the women come and go/ talking of Michelangelo.” Robert dispenses with the balloons altogether in the finished drawing.

The top sketch shows three guiding construction lines: a horizontal eye-line establishes the height and placement of the foreground figures. Two diagonal lines determine the top of the doors and place the women on the couch and the woman entering the room in a lower diagonal wedge, while the group of three muses and the woman leaving the room (the lone silhouetted figure) fit within a middle diagonal wedge. Changes from one sketch to another: the door opens to the left in the top and to the right in the bottom drawing, leading the viewer toward the other figures; the solitary man in glasses in the top sketch (perhaps Prufrock?) is replaced by a woman in the bottom drawing; and a TV set and Oscar statuette are added at bottom to fuse with the foreground figure’s elaborate hair bun in a way yet to be determined.

The one element missing from these sketches is Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein, so prominent in the finished drawing. The woman in the thinker pose between the profiled heads may have reminded Robert of Matisse’s portraits of dreaming and musing women. Picasso and Matisse were rivals; these quotations reference rivalries within art history, as well as differences in character. Stein was famous for her salon-style gathering of intellectuals, and Matisse was noted for dressing models as though they were part of an imaginary harem.