Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible | MetPublications

Baum, Kelly, Andrea Bayer, and Sheena Wagstaff with essays by Carmen C. Bambach, Thomas Beard, David Bomford, David Blayney Brown, Nicholas Cullinan, Michael Gallagher, Asher Ethan Miller, Nadine M. Orenstein, Diana Widmaier Picasso, Susan Stewart, and Nico Van Hout (2016)

This title is in print.

A Publishers Weekly Art, Architecture, and Photography Top Ten Book for 2016; BIGNY Book Show, Winner (2017)

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Inside the Catalogue—"Unfinished".

Description

This groundbreaking book explores the evolving concept of unfinishedness as essential to understanding art movements from the Renaissance to the present day. Unfinished features more than 200 works, created in a variety of media, by artists ranging from Leonardo, Titian, Rembrandt, Turner, and Cézanne to Picasso, Warhol, Twombly, Freud, Richter, and Nauman. What unites these works, across centuries and media, is that each one displays some aspect of being unfinished. Essays and case studies by major contemporary scholars address this key concept from the perspective of both the creator and the viewer, probing the impact that this long artistic trajectory—which can be traced back to the first century—has had on modern and contemporary art. The book investigates the degrees to which instances of incompleteness were accidental or intentional experimental or conceptual. Also included are illuminating interviews with contemporary artists, including Tuymans, Celmins, and Marden, and parallel considerations of the unfinished in literature and film. The result is a multidisciplinary approach and thought-provoking analysis that provide valuable insight into the making, meaning, and critical reception of the unfinished in art.

Table of contents

Director's Foreword
Thomas P. Campbell

Lenders to the Exhibition

Contributors

Acknowledgments

Introduction: An Unfinished History of Art
Kelly Baum, Andrea Bayer, and Sheena Wagstaff

Accident and Intention: The Renaissance and Beyond

Renaissance Views of the Unfinished
Andrea Bayer

Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Notions of the Unfinished in Art
Carmen C. Bambach

The Arrogance of Intervention: Restoring the Unfinished
Michael Gallagher

Old-Age Style and the Non Finito
David Bomford

The Unfinished and the Eye of the Beholder
Nico Van Hout

Plates 1–29

States of Resolution: Rembrandt and the Unfinished Print
Nadine M. Orenstein

Plates 30–60

Portraiture and the Question of Focus
Andrea Bayer and Nicholas Cullinan

"Finishing Well": Lucian Freud
Nicholas Cullinan

Plates 61–92

Assimilation and Reinvention: The Modern Era

Finish/Finished: French Painting from Romanticism to Impressionism
Asher Ethan Miller

The Literary Unfinished
Susan Stewart

Plates 93–126

Turner Unfinished
David Blayney Brown

Plates 127–31

Definitively Unfinished Sculpture: Rodin to Nauman
Nicholas Cullinan

Plates 132–43

Picasso Finished/Unfinished
Diana Widmaier Picasso

Plates 144–53

Scene Missing: Unfinished Film
Thomas Beard

The Raw and the Cooked: Unfinishedness in Twentieth and Twenty-First-Century Art
Kelly Baum

Plates 154–205

In the Studio

Interview with Vija Celmins
Eva Reifert

Interview with Marlene Dumas
Sheena Wagstaff

Interview with Brice Marden
Sheena Wagstaff

Interview with Luc Tuymans
Nicholas Cullinan

Interview with Rebecca Warren
Sheena Wagstaff

Notes to the Essays

Works in the Exhibition
Carmen C. Bambach, Kelly Baum, Andrea Bayer, Jane R. Becker, Peter Jonathan Bell, Keith Christiansen, Jennifer Farrell, Elizabeth M. Kornhauser, Brinda Kumar, Mary Clare McKinley, Asher Ethan Miller, Nadine M. Orenstein, Eva Reifert, and Thayer Tolles

Index

Photograph Credits

About the authors

Kelly Baum is Curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Andrea Bayer is Jayne Wrightsman Curator in the Department of European Paintings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Sheena Wagstaff is Leonard A. Lauder Chairman in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Press reviews

Spectator

"Well worth buying for the sake of its scholarly insights, and I learnt a good deal from its essayists...This interesting volume and exhibition give us plenty of room to ponder."

Tags

Authors

Andrea Bayer | Kelly Baum | Sheena Wagstaff

Artists

Keywords

Titles by thematic category (830)

European Art (General)

Modern and Contemporary Art

Titles by author (33)

Kelly Baum

Andrea Bayer

Sheena Wagstaff

Exhibition

Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible

March 18–September 4, 2016

This exhibition addresses a subject critical to artistic practice: the question of when a work of art is finished. Beginning with the Renaissance masters, this scholarly and innovative exhibition examines the term "unfinished" in its broadest possible sense, including works left incomplete by their makers, which often give insight into the process of their creation, but also those that partake of a non finito—intentionally unfinished—aesthetic that embraces the unresolved and open-ended. Some of history's greatest artists explored such an aesthetic, among them Titian, Rembrandt, Turner, and Cézanne.

The unfinished has been taken in entirely new directions by modern and contemporary artists, among them Janine Antoni, Lygia Clark, Jackson Pollock, and Robert Rauschenberg, who alternately blurred the distinction between making and un-making, extended the boundaries of art into both space and time, and recruited viewers to complete the objects they had begun.

Comprising 197 works dating from the Renaissance to the present—approximately forty percent of which are drawn from the Museum's own collection, enhanced by major national and international loans—this exhibition demonstrates The Met's unique capacity to mine its rich collection and scholarly resources to present modern and contemporary art within a deep historical context.