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Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible

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 out of print.

A Publishers Weekly Art, Architecture, and Photography Top Ten Book for 2016; Gold Winner in Art Category, Foreword Reviews' Book of the Year Award (2016); BIGNY Book Show, Winner (2017)

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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (10)
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.