Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible by Kelly Baum, Andrea Bayer & Sheena Wagstaff - review by Brian Dillon

Brian Dillon

So Far So Good

Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible

By

The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Yale University Press 336pp £40
 

Written in 1831 and set in 1612, Honoré de Balzac’s curious tale ‘The Unknown Masterpiece’ could be a fable for the avant-garde of 1917 or the participatory art of our own century. A young Nicolas Poussin meets two older painters: the cynical Porbus and the mysterious Frenhofer, who has been working for ten years in a futile effort to capture the glow of a young woman’s flesh. At length, with Poussin’s mistress as his model, the aged artist produces a composition overworked to the point of catastrophe, ‘colours daubed one on top of the other and contained by a mass of strange lines forming a wall of paint’. Only a tiny, delicate foot emerges from the chaos. Although none of the three artists knows it, the painting is a perfectly imperfect expression of the principle that ruined, botched or otherwise incomplete works of art are frequently the most prized.

‘The Unknown Masterpiece’ is mentioned more than once in Unfinished, a hefty catalogue of partial or imperfect works produced to accompany an exhibition at the Met. As the author-curators note early on, theirs is not a study of ruin, whether arrived at violently or by long, melancholy decay.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

RLF - March

A Mirror - Westend

Follow Literary Review on Twitter