"Marie-Thérèse was... a natural or "primitive" version of the uninhibited and all-accepting woman the Surrealists were trying so hard to construct. ...Their relationship was rooted in a complex game of hiding and revealing, which soon spilled over into his art. Picasso's earliest representations of her were not paintings but geometric line drawings of musical instruments, done in pencil, in which he encodes cryptograms that use her initials: M-T. There is something charmingly adolescent about the gesture... The linear style of these works [line and charcoal drawings, plus The Dress Designer's Workshop and The Painter and His Model] is directly related to the notational systems Picasso was using in the studies for his illustrations for Balzac's Unknown Masterpiece—a story in which a seventeenth-century painter named Frenhof spends years working on what is supposed to be his masterpiece, and overworks it to such a degree that he finally produces an incomprehensible muddle."