Artwork: Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881–1973). Carafe and Candlestick. 1909.
For many who stand before the world of art, we assume it has reached its final form, and that the artists have completed their task of transforming an abstract idea into a physical object. But for many works, completion never comes. Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible, on view at the Met Breur, New York, through September 4, 2016, explores this idea at length.
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Featuring over 190 works dating from the Renaissance to the present, Unfinished draws primarily on the Museum’s collection, and is supplemented with major national and international loans. The exhibition includes works by some of the greatest figures in Western art, including da Vinci, Titian, Rembrandt, van Eyck, Turner, Cézanne, van Gogh, Rodin, Picasso, Klimt, Jackson Pollock, Louise Bourgeois, Yayoi Kasuma, Alice Neel, Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, and Robert Rauschenberg, among others.
Leonardo da Vinci (Italian, 1452–1519). Head of a Woman. 1508.
The exhibition examines the idea of “unfinished” in the broadest possible way; it includes works that are left incomplete as well as works that engage a non finito (intentionally unfinished) aesthetic that embraces the complexities of the unresolved and open-ended. The works that are left unfinished are usually because of an accident, such as the artist’s death, and often provide insights into the artist’s creative process, allowing us to observe the underlying skeleton of the work in progress. Whereas the works that engage non finito are intentionally left this way by the artist. This is a fairly new practice in Western art, adopted in the mid-to-late twentieth century by modern and contemporary artists exploring their process as the act of art itself.
As the exhibition progresses through time, we begin to discern the ways in which incompletion becomes part of the work itself, and are able to consider it as central to our understanding of the individual work as well as the act of creation as well. For the older works, which fall into the first category, it is as though a seal is peeled back and we are given access to that which we do not typically see. The masterpiece, as it is known, is always presented as a the finished work; here we can see the mind of the master engaging in the process and giving us insight into their practice.
Janine Antoni (American, born 1964). Lick and Lather. 1993.
For the more recent works that intentionally engage with incompletion as part of the experience of the work, we are left to consider how difficult it sometimes is to know when a work is complete—unless we are told. For modern and contemporary artists, the act of execution is one that has its own original path, and, as Unfinished reminds us, it isn’t something we necessarily or inherently know in and of itself. This is what makes Unfinished exciting; it challenges our assumptions while providing dynamic new insights into the history of Western art and the way in which its practitioners explore, engage, and disengage with the objects they create.
All images: Courtesy of the Met Breuer.
Miss Rosen is a New York-based writer, curator, and brand strategist. There is nothing she adores so much as photography and books. A small part of her wishes she had a proper library, like in the game of Clue. Then she could blaze and write soliloquies to her in and out of print loves.
