A Day at the Whitney/MET Breuer

I just had an opportunity to visit the old Whitney Museum which houses the MET Breuer collection. The MET Breuer opened in March of this year as an extension of the modern art collection held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I’ve been curious about how the space is now being used so I was excited to take a look. The exterior remains unchanged and the interior portions of the museum also remain largely the same as the old Whitney.

Of the 2 exhibitions currently on display – Unfinished, Thoughts Left Visible and Diane Arbus, In the Beginning, I found the exhibit on unfinished works of art to be the most interesting.

This exhibit looks at the question of unfinished works of art that are intentionally or unintentionally left incomplete.

Adolph Menzel, Alter in the Baroque Church, 1880

Andy Warhol, Do It Yourself, Violin, 1962

“The 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.” - MET Website (Source of this quote)