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Unfinished Painting Nico van Hout 9789461300607 Books

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The Unfinished Painting

Unfinished Painting Nico van Hout 9789461300607 Books

Product details Hardcover Publisher Ludion Editions NV (2012) Language English ISBN-10 9461300603

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Unfinished Painting Nico van Hout 9789461300607 Books Reviews

Nico van Hout is Curator in the Department of Seventeenth-Century Painting in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp. He has long been interested in what unfinished paintings are able to reveal about artists’ working methods and their ultimate aims, and his work was to have resulted in an exhibition at the Museum on this theme. But the exhibition could not be mounted before the Museum closed for extensive renovations, and since it will not re-open until 2018, it was decided to publish separately what would have been the exhibition’s accompanying volume. It is a somewhat idiosyncratic book, in that the selection of paintings is Dr. van Hout’s own, and of course it is only a small sampling of the vast number of unfinished paintings that we know of. But it seems to be a quite representative sampling, at least chronologically, spanning as it does some 500 years of art history, from Jan van Eyck’s “Saint Barbara” (1437) to Piet Mondrian’s last canvas, the so-called “Victory Boogie Woogie” from 1944. Geographically, it is not quite so broad Benjamin West and Gilbert Stuart are the only two non-European-born artists represented, but within the Western tradition, it is quite comprehensive, and Dr. van Hout has chosen works of significant artists for his consideration apart from Van Dyck and Mondrian, there are also Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Dürer, Titian, El Greco, Rubens, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Turner, Courbet, Degas, Manet, van Gogh, Cézanne, Picasso, and Matisse—just to name some of the heavier hitters in the line-up. There are altogether forty-nine numbered exhibits, each with a full-page reproduction and with a two or three page essay explaining the reasons for its inclusion. The reproductions are excellent in color and clarity, frequently accompanied by detail blow-ups, and always supported by additional illustrations, either of earlier stages in the work’s creation or of other paintings for comparative purposes.

The author discusses forty artists, and so there is a great variety of reasons why works have been left unfinished or at least considered at some time by others to be unfinished. One of the more obvious reasons for an artist abandoning a work in mid-stream is the obsolescence or irrelevance of the original commission. A case in point is Benjamin West’s commission to record the American-British negotiations leading up to the Treaty of Paris in 1782, which famously shows only the five American representatives and is appropriately titled “American Commissioners of the Preliminary Peace Agreement with Great Britain”—the problem having been that the original agreement between the British Prime Minister, Lord Shelburne, and his good friend, Benjamin Franklin, was voided after Shelburne’s government was replaced by one less eager to have Britain’s loss of its American colony artistically rendered (141)—and so the Americans at the left side of the table face a big canvas void on the right. And Jacques-Louis David’s fifteen months of work on “The Oath of the Tennis Court “ were put paid to when the Terror of 1793/94 redefined many of the heroes of the Revolution as traitors David managed to hang on to his head, but finally relinquished his barely commenced and impossibly large canvas to the safekeeping of the Louvre (148). Another obvious reason for an abandoned canvas is the death of the artist; given that most painters usually have more than one project going at the same time, some of them are destined to be left incomplete upon the master’s demise or, as in the case of Poussin, upon the master’s recognition that his strength is no longer sufficient to finish realizing shortly before his death in 1665 that his “Apollo and Daphne” would never be finished, the artist chose to give the unfinished canvas to his patron anyway (130). Also, many artists, especially in the seventeenth century, left behind numbers of unfinished canvases in their studios because of their custom of keeping on hand a supply of “ready-to-go” works that could be completed on demand for a potential buyer, and some artists have been famous for never being able to consider a work complete in any case. Degas, for example, left hundreds of his own works behind, possibly because he did not consider them finished—and that was true even of pieces he had already sold the author recalls Degas’s confession to Ambroise Vollard that he found it hard to let his paintings go and recounts Vollard’s story about Ernest Rouart’s chaining “Danseuses” to his wall so that the artist could not reclaim it for another touch or two (172).

That circumstance of course raises the question of who determines that a work is unfinished. Apart from obvious cases like West’s American half of a bipartite painting, not even empty canvas is conclusive, as we can see easily in some of Cézanne’s late landscapes such as “The Garden at Les Lauves” (c. 1906; the jacket illustration is a detail), in which the patches of color are clearly meant to resonate with the areas of unpainted support. Many of Turner’s later oils seem to be unfinished but were apparently finished in his own eyes when, after painting in public during the “varnishing days” before a Royal Academy show, he would abruptly pack up his tools and walk off (156); exactly their “unfinished” character is what endeared them to the Impressionists and the abstract painters of the next century, but who is to say that a given piece is a “finished oil sketch” or an “unfinished oil painting”? Up until the seventeenth century, the difference between finished and unfinished was determined by the expectations of the patron and public if a cardinal or a count was paying for a painting, he decided when it was done. But that expectation was increasingly mitigated by the emerging notions of artistic individualism and aesthetic independence, so that Rembrandt, for example, reserved the decision to himself and is reputed to have stated that “a work is finished when the master has achieved his intention in it” (129). Now it seems largely to be a matter of consensus, in which contention is also always a part, and that is what makes Dr. van Hout’s discussions so interesting; rarely do we have an artist’s own view, and even if we did, what does it matter? Degas says his painting isn’t finished, but every one else says it is; Turner says he’s done, but no one else thinks so—so who can we believe? In the end, it comes down to our own judgment about what the work tells us. Is Gainsborough’s “The Painter’s Daughters Holding a Cat” (c. 1760-61) simply unfinished, or is it a matter of the “non-finito” being successfully applied “as a stylistic figure to express the youthful freshness of his unmanageable brood” (136)? Can we say of Piero della Francesca’s “Baptism of Christ” (c. 1450-60) that it “is still being developed and does not yet look the way the artist ultimately intended” (38) without arrogating to ourselves the presumption of what that intention was? These are complicated questions that Dr. van Hout considers in his general introduction and especially in his very thoughtful commentaries on the individual paintings. In them, he addresses aspects of the painting process that are particularly revealed by the lack of finish, e.g., questions of the supports chosen, pigments used, techniques of transitioning from area to area of the surface, etc. It is clear that he has thought long and deeply about such issues, and he has many informative and stimulating things to say about them. This is a book that should be welcome to anyone who wants to be guided on a fresh and unusual look at Western painting of the past few centuries. Text and illustrations are equally outstanding, and the Ludion/Abrams production values, as evidenced by the easily legible typeface and uncluttered layout, are superb. Each item has a few tips for further reading, there is an index of proper names, and the translation from the Dutch is impeccable. Warmly recommended.