July 14, 2016

Introducing the NEW Met Breuer!

When the Whitney Museum of American Art decamped from the Upper East Side of Manhattan to its new, Renzo Piano-designed space in the Meat Packing District, its former Marcel Breuer building was left vacant and looking for a new occupant.  In a remarkable example of institutional recycling, an agreement was quickly reached with the nearby Metropolitan Museum of Art which acquired the Bauhaus edifice to house its expanding collection of Modern and Contemporary art.  Last March, less than a year after the Whitney's move downtown, The Met Breuer officially opened as the third Manhattan location of this magnificent museum.

Partly because I have been traveling a lot this year, and also to avoid the initial crowds, I did not visit the "new" Met until just this week when I walked over to Madison Avenue and 75th Street as I had done many times before to go to the Whitney.  From the outside very little had changed, save for a red ceiling on the concrete canopy that covers visitors from the street to the entrance.  Once inside, only the new signage signaled a change in ownership - everything, from the slate floors, the "honeycomb" ceilings and the trapezoid shaped windows was exactly the same as it had always been.

Curiously, the inaugural exhibition "Unfinished:  Thoughts Left Visible" does not fall entirely within The Met Breuer's focus on 20th and 21st century art.  Rather, it presents 197 works created in the 16th century...

 Perino del Vaga
"Holy Family with Saint John the Baptist", 1528-30

17th century...

Peter Paul Rubens
"Henry IV at the Battle of Ivry", c. 1628-30
18th century...
Anton Raphael Mengs
"Portrait of Mariana de Silva y Sarmiento,
duquesa de Huescar", 1775

19th century... 

Vincent Van Gogh
"Street in Auvers-sur-Oise", 1890
and finally 20th century...

Jackson Pollock
"Number 28, 1950", 1950

with the one common thread being - they are all either intentionally or unintentionally unfinished.
In "Unfinished:  Thoughts Left Visible", the curators pose the question "When is a work of art finished?" and we, the visitor, are left to fill in the blanks.  Sometimes a work is not finished on purpose, non finito, and the artist leaves the end up to the viewer's imagination as in this portrait of Saint Bartholomew by Rembrandt...

Sometimes life's circumstances prevent the work from being completed as in this obviously unfinished portrait of Vietnam soldier "James Hunter Black Draftee" by Alice Neel painted in 1965 just as the sitter was called up...

And sometimes, the artist just got "stuck" and couldn't find the right way to end what he or she had begun as in Louise Bourgeois "Untitled No. 2", 1992...

All in all, "Unfinished" provides a unique perspective art throughout the ages.  Not only does it force the question of what makes "art", "art", it also impresses upon the viewer just how difficult it is to create a work of art.  "Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible" was a very clever choice for an inaugural exhibition and we hope it sets the standard for what's to come at the new Met Breuer!

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