Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Unfinished painting
Barnett Newman American
Not on view
This painting’s history reveals how precarious the notion of finish can be in abstract art in general and in the work of one towering figure of the Abstract Expressionist movement in particular. A 1971 scholarly publication presented the work as finished: Untitled (number 2). However, a typewritten inventory of Newman’s studio made after the artist’s death (unknown, apparently, to the author of the aforementioned book) lists the canvas as Untitled 1970 #2 (unfinished), a status now accepted by art historians. Many of Newman’s contemporaries attacked the idea of a finished work of art as an artificial convention, but Newman disavowed it for different reasons. For him, painting was a lifelong struggle, an ongoing act of labor that precluded finishing on both a practical and a philosophical level.
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