The UCLA Library Special Collections is one of the university’s–if not West Los Angeles’–best kept secrets. In the basement floor of the Young Research Library, just off the campus’s renowned sculpture garden, dusty folios and manuscripts lie behind glass cases.

The collection holds works like the original manuscripts of Virginia Woolf and Ray Bradbury (who completed Farenheit 451 on a rented typrewriter in the basement of UCLA’s Powell Library). But perhaps the most fascinating piece in the gallery is Homage a Gertrude, a small 1908 painting by Picasso that mimics his infamous Demoiselles d’Avignon. Few aside from library researchers have seen the painting.

Like Demoiselles, the painting features nude female figures at disjointed angles in a nondescript room with parted curtains. The work is quite small, however, and bears the titular inscription “Homage a Gertrude”, for Picasso’s friend and patron Gertrude Stein. The painting hung in the writer’s bedroom for years, and was donated to UCLA by her partner Alice Toklas.