Portrait of an Unknown Lady

by María Gainza, Thomas Bunstead (Translator)

Overview

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

New York Times Notable author María Gainza, who dazzled critics with Optic Nerve, returns with the captivating story of an auction house employee on the trail of an enigmatic master forger

In the Buenos Aires art world, a master forger has achieved legendary status. Rumored to be a woman, she specializes in canvases by the painter Mariette Lydis, a portraitist of Argentinean high society. But who is this absurdly gifted creator of counterfeits? What motivates her? And what is her link to the community of artists who congregate, night after night, in a strange establishment called the Hotel Melancólico?

On the trail of this mysterious forger is our narrator, an art critic and auction house employee through whose hands counterfeit works have passed. As she begins to take on the role of art-world detective, adopting her own methods of deception and manipulation, she warns us “not to proceed in expectation of names, numbers or dates . . . My techniques are those of the impressionist.”

Driven by obsession and full of subtle surprise, Portrait of an Unknown Lady is a highly seductive and enveloping meditation on what we mean by "authenticity" in art, and a captivating exploration of the gap between what is lived and what is told.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781646220328
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	03/22/2022
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	702,215
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

María Gainza was born in Buenos Aires, where she still resides. She has worked as a correspondent for The New York Times in Argentina, as well as for ARTnews. She has also been a contributor to Artforum, The Buenos Aires Review, Radar, the cultural supplement from Argentine newspaper Página/12. She is coeditor of the collection Los Sentidos (The Senses) on Argentinean art, and in 2011 she published Textos elegidos (Selected Texts).

Thomas Bunstead has translated some of the leading Spanish-­language writers working today, including Bernardo Atxaga, Agustín Fernández Mallo, and Enrique Vila-­Matas, and his own writing has appeared in publications such as Brixton Review of Books, Lit Hub, and The White Review. He is currently a Royal Literary Fellow teaching at Aberystwyth University. He was born in London and now lives in Pembrokeshire, Wales.

Editorial Reviews

★ 11/01/2021

Gainza (Optic Nerve) returns with a ruminative account of the pursuit of a master forger who has gone off the grid in a dreamy Buenos Aires. The unnamed narrator, a young woman, works for art authenticator Enriqueta Macedo, who for decades has been fraudulently authenticating paintings forged by a woman named Renée, who specialized in passing off works of Mariette Lydis, one of the country’s greatest portraitists (“They resemble women about to turn into animals, or animals not since long made human,” the narrator says of Lydis’s subjects). Gainza paints an impressionistic group portrait of artist, authenticator, and forger: Lydis’s flight from Nazi-occupied Vienna to Argentina, recounted through an auction catalog (“Painting is worth more if there’s a story behind it”); Enriqueta’s initiation as a young woman into a group called the Melancholical Forgers, Inc.; and Renée’s reign during the “golden age of art forgery.” The narrator, who after Enriqueta’s death becomes an art critic, is intrigued by Renée as a biographical subject, and embarks on a quest to track down the long-since-disappeared counterfeiter. Digressions, aphorisms, and dead ends pile up along the way in a hypnotic search defined by “Sehnsucht... the German term denoting a melancholic desire for some intangible thing.” The characters’ incertitude and the narrative’s lack of resolution only intensify the mysterious communion Gainza evokes between like-minded souls. This captivating work is one to savor. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
A New Yorker Best Book of the Year
A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of The Year
A Town and Country Must-Read Book of Spring
A CrimeReads Best International Crime Book of the Month

"Gainza has much to say about the creative life, about art and ways of seeing, about perception and reality, authenticity and simulation, fidelity and betrayal. These are matters she takes seriously and about which she writes with exceptional acuity and precision. But the dominant spirit . . . is one of playfulness and humor." —Sigrid Nunez, The New York Review of Books

"Argentine art critic and novelist María Gainza’s Portrait of an Unknown Lady takes an unorthodox perspective on the modern-art market, offering a kind of homage to the underworld of forgery . . . Ms. Gainza proves herself a dab hand at concisely digesting artists’ lives, finding delight in idiosyncrasy and social rebellion." —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

"María Gainza’s Portrait of an Unknown Lady, translated from Spanish by Thomas Bunstead, takes a more philosophical look at the art world by questioning what constitutes an artist. The titular portrait is figurative; our narrator, a disillusioned art critic in Buenos Aires using the nom de plume María Lydis, is investigating a mysterious figure . . . Bunstead’s colorful translation reads at times as an adventure serial, at times as a hard-boiled noir, and throughout it all, María uses her wit, erudition and sass to suss out the true meaning of art." —Cory Oldweiler, The Washington Post

"Gainza weaves a fascinating, often confounding story about beauty, obsession and authenticity . . . Like Bolaño, she writes stories within stories, each with its own melancholy mood and unsolvable mystery . . . A novel with many beautiful, confounding moments. Maria Gainza is sharp, modern and playful, a writer who multiplies the possibilities for fiction." —Johanna Thomas-Corr, The Guardian

"Exploring issues of authenticity and originality, Argentine novelist and art critic Gainza offers up an impressionistic, unconventional, and highly rewarding novel about a group of art forgers in Buenos Aires in the 1960s." —David Conrads, The Christian Science Monitor

“A truly exquisite novel . . . moving, clever and written with a wry precision.” —Stuart Kelly, The Scotsman

"There’s a lot to like in Portrait of an Unknown Lady, from the slick Argentinian high-society setting, to the lovely writing and laudable translation from Bunstead." —Ian J. Battaglia, Chicago Review of Books

"The value of truth, reality, and authenticity are all interrogated in this stunningly slippery novel, as Gainza eloquently probes the difference between art and artifice . . . Portrait of an Unknown Lady is wholly original, a quality which things both real and replicated can possess, so long as the creator knows what they are doing. And, with Gainza, readers are in the hands of a master." —Kristin Iversen, Just Circling Back

"Intelligent and tensile . . . A loose investigation into the nature of art and of memory, scattered with gems of intrigue and insight." —Emily Temple, Lit Hub, One of the Most Anticipated Books of the Year

"A mesmerizing deep dive into the art world through a neo-noir female detective's quest to find a forger in Buenos Aires . . . Dreamy and atmospheric . . . Portrait of an Unknown Lady, eschewing structure and neat plot convention for vibrant language and a hypnotic voice, complicates rather than clarifies the stories that are told about enigmatic women." —Shelf Awareness (starred review)

"This captivating work is one to savor." —Publishers Weekly (starred and boxed review)

"The work of an author in full command of her talents. The result is an exploration of identity and authenticity that asks what it means to be 'real,' as the term is applied either to a work of art or to a life . . . Subtle, incandescent, and luminous—a true master’s work." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"The mutable, esoteric art world is again the setting for award-winning Argentinian Gainza’s latest, deftly translated by British writer-editor Bunstead . . . Shrewd audiences will surely enjoy the engrossing challenge of an unpredictable pursuit." —Booklist

"There are many pleasures to be had in reading Portrait of an Unknown Lady: its sublime, transcendent sentences, its arch and shadowy figures. Most of all, the zone to which you are transported, which is a Buenos Aires of canvases, trap doors, and dreams." —Amina Cain, author of Indelicacy

"Vividly detailed and saturated with intricate feeling, Gainza's novel is an engrossing exploration of authenticity, obsession, and the enveloping allure of art." —Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun

From the Publisher

★ 2022-01-12
An art critic chases the identity of a legendary forger through the testimonies of the aging counterculture denizens who knew her.

In 1960s Buenos Aires, a group of “tatty bohemians” take up residence in a decaying mansion they’ve dubbed the Hotel Melancholical. Among the poets, painters, photographers, translators, and philosophers that make up the heady menagerie is a hypnotically charismatic, flinty-eyed woman named Renée who is an accomplished art forger, specializing in the works of (real-life) Austrian Argentine portraitist Mariette Lydis. The hotel’s residents all have a role in the scheme—from forging the labels on the backs of paintings to publicizing the pieces to Buenos Aires galleries—and they all split the resulting profits, but they need somebody on the inside to provide the final touch: a certificate of authenticity from the art valuations department of the Ciudad Bank. This is managed by Enriqueta, Renée’s friend and fellow student at Argentinean Fine Arts Academy, who uses her position to pass along Renée’s forgeries for years until Renée, always a mercurial figure, drops out of the art scene and then out of sight entirely. Or at least this is what Enriqueta tells her new assistant, our narrator, who opens the novel many years later holed up in the Hotel Étoile, where she has retreated to write the story of the indomitable Enriqueta, known at the end of her long career at the bank simply as “Herself”; the fabled Renée, whose life the narrator pieces together through the contradictory accounts of her now-octogenarian cohort; and Mariette Lydis, whose actual story rivals anything that could be invented for her. Gainza’s expertise in the world of art criticism, with its cultivated language and capricious moods, and her loving eye for the history, architecture, and people of Buenos Aires are on display in this book, as they were in her debut, Optic Nerve (2019). As fine as that novel was, however, the nuance in the way this story develops, wending its way through its layers of plot, history, and biography even as it spotlights the unflinching women who stalk through them all, is the work of an author in full command of her talents. The result is an exploration of identity and authenticity that asks what it means to be “real,” as the term is applied either to a work of art or to a life.

Subtle, incandescent, and luminous—a true master’s work.

Kirkus Reviews