http://nyti.

ms/1eaq4Qi

ART & DESIGN

The Fascination of the Unfinished

JAN. 9, 2014

Critics Notebook
By ROBERTA SMITH

Unfinished paintings are enticing cracks in the facade of art history, lures along the path to a deeper understanding of artistic processes and impulses. For all the paintings that artists complete, countless others are left incomplete for any number of reasons poverty or war, a change of plan or vision, the illness or death of the artist. While many of these works have been destroyed, and others forgotten, some are now recognized as significant works of art, accorded a special place in history and in an artists body of work, in part because they can bring us closer to understanding the mysterious process of painting, and, indeed, to paintings future. After all, nothing inspires a young artist like a close look at how an earlier one worked. I started thinking about unfinished canvases on my first, euphoric visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Arts reconfigured galleries of European paintings last spring. Everything seemed new, even paintings I had seen scores of times. Thats how I came to be transfixed by Jean-Baptiste Greuzes Aegina Visited by Jupiter, specifically by a striking mass of loose, brushy gray hovering above the reclining, mostly nude form, a cloud that would have done Monet proud. I consulted the label, which explained that that portion of the painting was unfinished. After rediscovering the Greuze, I came upon three or four more paintings in quick succession whose less-than-complete surfaces were confirmed by their labels as unfinished. A roundup of the Mets unfinished paintings began to present itself. When I returned to this subject late last fall, the Met provided a list of paintings on view that are considered unfinished. It included more than two dozen works from the 15th century to the late 19th. And a wonderful list it is,

full of anomalies and gems. Many of them are discussed here, interspersed with glances at other paintings whose loosening brushwork can sometimes look unfinished but isnt. The earliest unfinished European painting on display at the Met right now, in Gallery 640, is a real knockout: Virgin and Child With Saints by a Flemish artist referred to as the Ghent Painter (who might be Hugo van der Goes or Jean Hey). This exquisite oil-on-wood image demonstrates one of the stranger ways that a work can be, or in this case become, unfinished. Completed around 1472 in the meticulously realist style perfected by Jan van Eyck (1390-1441), the painting was modified in the early 17th century to depict the marriage of Henry VII to Elizabeth of York. The Virgin and Child in the center and St. John the Baptist to the left of them were scraped off and replaced, respectively, with a central view into a cathedral and the bride. The lavishly dressed St. Louis (himself a king) on the far right became Henry with a few adjustments in crown and gown. The painting, which has been on loan to the Met since 1999, was restored in 1983; the added images and details were removed, revealing the nearly intact ink drawing of the Virgin and Child and partial sketches of St. John. Having been finished and refinished, the restored work is now unfinished, providing a glimpse of the preparatory precision of Flemish painters, and also looking, on first sight, very much like a collage. In Gallery 643, youll find two more unfinished paintings. Albrecht Durers touching Salvator Mundi from around 1505, also in oil on wood, provides another sight of concise underdrawing. Only the face, skillfully rendered in ink and adding a slightly otherworldly effect, more spirit than flesh, is unfinished. Nearby is Joseph Interpreting the Dreams of Pharaoh, dated 1535-47 and attributed to another German painter, Jrg Breu the Younger. It seems to have been painted from back to front and from the outside edges in, with the result that the two dogs and the foreground tile are only outlined, and the faces of the central group are mostly blank. Painted in distemper on a finely woven canvas, the work has faded and has the pale softness of a tapestry. Another knockout awaits in Gallery 642: The Arrival in Bethlehem, from around 1540, by a painter known by the rapperish moniker of Master LC. This image was apparently being worked on from front to back, with a pregnant Mary and Joseph arriving at the far left most defined, and the town and countryside indicated with thin layers of color and underdrawing, especially in the elegantly

outlined houses ringing the town square. The resulting delicacy contributes to the paintings gentle, dreamlike mood. In Gallery 607, it is hard to miss the large, marvelously rough oil sketch for Tintorettos Doge Alvise Mocenigo (1507-1577) Presented to the Redeemer. With a figure that might have been rendered by the 20th-century painter Giorgio de Chirico, white outlines defining clothing here and there and the lion of St. Mark obscured by a patch of dark paint that suggests a slightly sinister shadow, this elaborate scene was never meant to be more than a work in progress. It was abandoned either for other sketches or the actual commission, a mural intended for the Doges Palace in Venice. The sketch once belonged to the 19th-century British art critic John Ruskin. On the opposite wall of this gallery, youll find a painting left unfinished when its maker died: Jacopo Bassanos dark, foreboding Baptism of Christ. This extraordinary work, which Bassanos family held on to for more than a century after his death in 1592, survived in its unfinished form because of the Renaissances new respect for non finito (unfinished) works as efforts that might represent the artists deeper intention as well or better than finished ones. As the label notes, the baptism of Jesus is usually a daytime event, not a nocturnal one. Here it becomes riven with sadness. Everything foretells the tragic course ahead. The label also suggests that this work has something in common with Goyas Black Paintings, which seems right. It even has a little in common with the black-on-black paintings of Ad Reinhardt. If you peer into the black for a while, two big mountains seem to peer back. One of my favorite Rembrandt paintings in the Met (Gallery 637) is his mysterious portrait of a young woman thought to be Hendrickje Stoffels, his companion from about 1650 until her death in 1663. With her bowed head, Stoffels seems to intently study something beyond the pictures bottom edge. Her face is gentle, and the label identifies her hands and garment, which is loosely dappled with dots of brown and deep orange, as possibly unfinished, or perhaps painted in admiration of Titian, one of the first users of oil paint to emphasize visible brushwork, especially in late works like Venus and Adonis (in Gallery 607). The gray-clouded Greuze, Aegina Visited by Jupiter, has pride of place in Gallery 615. Started in 1767, it was intended as a presentation painting for the French Royal Academy, required for a candidate member to become a full

member. Greuze was so overdue in delivering that he was prohibited from exhibiting in the annual Salon that year. The picture was still unfinished raw and modern across the top, at least at his death nearly 40 years later. A different canvas earned him full membership in 1769, but as a genre painter, not a history painter, to his great disappointment. Perhaps he kept the Aegina painting as self-punishment, evidence of his unfulfilled promise. Across the room, dont miss Fragonards scintillating Woman With a Dog, a finished work from 1769 in which the lustrous striped silk dress of the sitter is defined by brushwork every bit as visible and nonchalant as Greuzes cloud. Unfinished paintings can feel contemporary because the history of Western painting is to some extent about an ever-increasing unfinishedness and loosening of surface. Think of the progression from the startling exactitude of van Eyck and the velvety brushiness of Titian to the painterly roughness of the Impressionists. Additionally, unfinished paintings are mysterious, even eliciting a slight sense of voyeurism, since we are looking at things that were supposed to be covered over but in the end were not. What halted their progress besides death, some loss of interest or failure of ambition? Perhaps it was the feeling, conscious or not, that the work was actually finished and would be recognized as such by coming generations? Keith Christiansen, chairman of the Mets European paintings department, told me that Pliny wrote of painters and sculptors signing their work faciebat instead of fecit that is, Apelles was doing this instead of Apelles did this and that Titian and Michelangelo both used the former at least once. The surfaces of paintings in the Mets galleries of 19th-century art hide less and less from us. Increasingly assertive brushwork is the rule. There are, of course, those who remained loyal to tighter, more academic rendering, or took it to breathtaking extremes. Such is the case in Gallery 801 with Odalisque in Grisaille, painted by the master of smooth, Jean-August-Dominique Ingres (and his workshop), between 1824 and 1834. A smaller, more simplified version of Ingress imperious Grande Odalisque (1814), which is in the Louvre, this work is so precise it resembles a photograph. Yet, unbelievably, it is unfinished. Look closely, and youll see signs of relative roughness in the sketchy foreground and dappled background, with the inner portion of the gleaming silk curtain at the right giving some notion of Ingress idea of finished.

Gallery 802 contains a beautiful monster of unfinishedness by the landscape painter Thodore Rousseau. Measuring over 5 feet high and 8 feet across, The Forest in Winter Sunset sits in the center of a long wall devoted to the artists work. Rousseau began the canvas in 1846, when he was in his mid-30s, but despite the urgings of friends, it remained unfinished at his death in 1867. Whether he continued to work on it until then is not known. It is mainly a welter of roughly rendered trees in dark brown and black for a dense screen of trunks and bare branches that blocks out all but a few vividly orange embers of the dying sun. The sky is a feeble ocher and gray that might be preparing to snow, laid on in broad strokes. This is an extremely assured work, one that presages not only the Impressionists but also Abstract Expressionist painters like Pollock and Still. You wonder if Rousseau had an inkling of how advanced it was and left it alone. In Gallery 815, youll find two unfinished works by Edgar Degas, a male nude from 1856 that becomes increasingly blocked in as you move from the highly finished head and shoulders toward the feet, and the sublime Madame Thodore Gobillard (Yves Morisot, 1838-1893), a portrait of the sister of the painter Berthe Morisot seated indoors. The Met considers the portrait unfinished, although the artists signature could be read as an intention to redefine what finished looks like. Except for a patch of brightly painted garden visible through a door in the background, the image is a delightfully thin skin of black, gray and white, brushed on casually but with unerring accuracy. Economical use is made of negative areas (the sitters hands and arms, visible through chiffon sleeves), while boldness prevails elsewhere (in the dress itself, in the broad sofas and in the heavily framed mirror). The head is an exquisite bit of underdrawing. To get a sense of what it would have taken to finish this work according to more conventional definitions, you have but to walk into the next gallery, 810, make a sharp right and study Degass Portrait of a Woman in Gray from around 1865. What a difference. Degas seems to have decided that with Madame Gobillard, less was more. Correction: January 11, 2014 A critics notebook article on Friday about unfinished paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art referred incorrectly to one, Virgin and Child With

Saints by a Flemish artist known as the Ghent Painter. It has been on loan to the Met since 1999; it did not enter the museums collection in 1889.
A version of this article appears in print on January 10, 2014, on page C27 of the New York edition with the headline: The Fascination of the Unfinished.

2014 The New York Times Company