The Met's UNFINISHED: THOUGHTS LEFT VISIBLE To Close Labor Day

One of the inaugural exhibitions at The Met Breuer, Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible examines a subject critical to artistic practice: the question of when a work of art is finished. With over 190 works dating from the Renaissance to the present-nearly 40 percent of which are drawn from The Met's collection, supplemented with major national and international loans-this exhibition demonstrates The Met's unique capacity to mine its rich collections and scholarly resources to present modern and contemporary art within a deep historical context.

This scholarly and innovative exhibition examines the term "unfinished" in the broadest possible way, 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.