No. 10 / 20 · Movements, by Gastón Solís
Le Lecteur†
the Cubist figure reading
Musée Picasso, Salle d’Études · Paris · 1992
† Disclosure
Upon the curator’s own examination of the Work, it is the settled opinion of this catalogue that the Work described in the present entry is a forgery. The Musée Picasso did not publish this Work and, it appears, has never exhibited the artwork shown. Both moral and legal considerations require the disclosure of this conclusion. The curator considers this a fraud of the lowest order. The entry is retained in the interest of the completeness of the record.
This painting is a lie. It is the gesture of Cubism made by someone who studied it from photographs in a library in another country, decades after the fact, with materials he had not been trained to use. The browns are slightly the wrong browns. The geometric fragmentation is decorative; nothing is being analyzed; nothing is being investigated.
Both the painting and its subject are engaged in the same fiction, and neither will ever break character. Le lecteur reads because reading is the alibi the mind has always offered the body. A novel would betray him: a novel asks for continuity, and continuity is the one thing the interval cannot supply. The newspaper obliges. The newspaper is a medium designed for interruption, made to be picked up and put down at the precise cadence of the body's other appointments. The reader holds the fragment and becomes one.
Provenance
Probably North America, c. 1935–50; private collection, Buenos Aires, by 1958, as Cubist (artist unidentified); estate sale, Buenos Aires, 1991, as Le Lecteur, manière cubiste; private collection, New York, 1991–2009; lent by the above to the Musée Picasso, Salle d’Études, Paris, for an attribution review, 1992 (the attribution to Picasso not sustained); the present collection, 2010.
