Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible
March 18–September 4, 2016
Met Breuer, New York

from the press release

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 40 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.

Cy Twombly’s work in the exhibition:

Cy Twombly, Untitled I–VI (Green Painting), 2002–03
Acrylic on plywood with artist's frame

These six works evoke a walk in the woods, or the whiteness of the Mediterranean Sea that was visible from Twombly’s studio in Gaeta, Italy. The artist fully embraced the combination of gravity and a vertical support - green paint cascades onto the panels and drips onto the rounded molding in a merging of image and frame, an abiding interest of Twombly's in the 1980s. He appears to have experimented with the sequence of panels, which may explain why Untitled I-VI (Green Painting) was not included in the catalogue raisonné of his paintings or exhibited during his lifetime; the works remained with Twombly until his death in 2011. To this day, it remains unclear whether the artist considered them finished or unfinished.

For further information:
Met Breuer, New York
metmuseum.org