Glacial Errata, No. 6 (For Real This Time)

One: Keith Haring, Unfinished Painting (1989)

Haring painted this shortly before his death, in early 1990, of complications from AIDS at the age of 31. He deliberately left the work unfinished. Someone posted this image to Bluesky the other day, and it reminded me of the 2016 show at the Met Breuer, “Unfinished,” consisting of 190 works of art that were left either deliberately or accidentally unfinished by their creators, and prompted me to assemble some of my own favorites of the genre.

Two: Gilbert Stuart, The Athenaeum Portrait (1796)

An obvious cliché by this point, I still love the circumstances of this painting’s origins—commissioned by Martha Washington to paint the former President and First Lady, Stuart instead saw the commercial potential in the work, and refused to finish it or deliver it to Martha, subsequently using it as the basis for multiple copies after Washington’s death (Stuart jokingly referred to it as his “hundred dollar bill,” since that was what he charged for reproductions). While some of the later copies were finished, and depicted Washington’s torso, there’s something about the original, where the clichéd image of Washington’s head is swallowed up entirely by an empty and unforgiving wasteland of brown, which seems to be encroaching on the subject, as though at any moment it will consume the canvas entirely.

Three: Alice Neel, Black Draftee (James Hunter) (1965)

There’s always something of the memento mori of the unfinished work; whether it remains unfinished because of the artist’s death or the subject’s: there’s a brokenness that calls into sharp relief of something that will now, forever, remain undone. Neel came across Hunter a week before he was scheduled to be sent to Vietnam, asked him to sit for her; when Hunter did not return the following day for a second sitting, Neel signed the work and called it finished. Hunter’s subsequent whereabouts have never been determined; his name does not appear on the Vietnam Memorial, so it is unlikely he was killed, but beyond that his fate is unknown.

Four: Henry Fuseli, Night and Her Children Aither & Hemera (c. 1810-1815)

Just as Haring’s image echoes Stuart’s in its composition, Neel’s, to my mind, echoes Stuart’s in its subject. But as compelling as I find these images in which there is only a head surrounded by a sea of encroaching blankness, equally compelling to me are those unfinished images such as Fuseli’s, where only the faces remain undone, as though censored or blighted out by some powerful light.

Contrary to the idea that the work must be finished, holistic, its effect unified and deliberate, unfinished work often feels more real and powerful to me, and is a reminder of the aesthetic effect of the broken, the collaged, the half-gestured, the truncated, and the piecemeal.

Five: Jan Van Eyck, Saint Barbara (1437)

It’s unclear to modern scholars if Van Eyck’s painting even is unfinished—there are signs to indicate that he may have been done with it, and that it represents, not a preliminary sketch to an unrealized painting, but rather an unusual drawing augmented with light coloring. This is true of a number of works in the Met’s Unfinished show, including several JMW Turner paintings that scholars cannot now tell if were meant to be finished or not. I love those, but have a slight preference for Van Eyck’s in this particular genre, since the image itself includes the tower where Saint Barbara is imprisoned, itself, in Van Eyck’s rendering, unfinished.