Unfinished at the Met Breuer

We saw the opening exhibit of what is now called the "Met Breuer".  It is the old Whitney Museum building on Madison Avenue, which is now an outpost of the Metropolitan Museum.   The featured opening exhibit was entitled "Unfinished".   The idea was to explore works of European art ranging from the 15th Century to the 21st Century that are either literally unfinished, or else invoke the notion of unfinished in some sense.   This is a very broad topic, perfectly capable of provoking all kinds of discussions, which, in our case, kind of lead nowhere.   There are too many variables involved to come to any clear sense of what unfinished means in artistic terms, except in the literal sense when the artist died before he or she finished a work.     The best thing, though, was that the museum was filled with wonderful and astonishing works of art, many of which the Met had borrowed from elsewhere.   It was quite a shock to get off the elevator on the third floor of the Whitney and to see paintings by Titian et. al. after all these years of seeing nothing but 20th century American art in that building.

An unfinished work by Reubens:

There was a wonderful room of late Turner paintings which were apparently thought of as unfinished after his death and eventually consigned to the Tate's attic.   Now, of course, we don't think of them as unfinished.  Or do we?

This Klimt is clearly unfinished, but I found it to be a nicely subversive version of the Klimt paintings that have become all too iconic these days.

In the 20th century portions of the exhibit, the notion of unfinished becomes more philosophical.

Witness this grayish work by Roman Opalka, which from a distance looks like this:

Looking closer,  this is what you see:

He had the notion of writing out the numbers to visualize infinity.   He never got there...

Then there is Cezanne..

And Picasso:

And did I mention Rembrandt, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci?

A truly spectacular exhibition...

Postscript:

It was interesting to read the New York Times art critic's takes on this show.   There were many contemporary woman artists in the show, so they couldn't complain about that.   But they did complain about the lack of Non-European works in the show, or as Roberta Smith put it, leaving  "....the Met very much in its comfort zone, with older art in a hermetically sealed Eurocentric bubble."    Really!   The Met must be the most non-Eurocentric museum in New York, as they exhibit and treat with great respect art from all cultures.  And the curators even addressed the issue in an interview, mentioning that the notion of "unfinished" became even more complex and problematic when other cultures were involved.