When the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced that it would be taking an eight-year lease on the Marcel Breuer building left vacant by the Whitney Museum’s move downtown, the first question everyone asked was: Why?
A widely shared guess was that the Met would use the extra space for showing contemporary art, without which, the word is, no museum can now survive. My own hope was twofold: first, that the Met would seize the chance to deepen, complicate and correct the stories of historical art that it now paints with a broad, imprecise brush; and second, that it would integrate old art and new to demonstrate the centuries-spanning reality of globalism in a way that other museums in globalist New York are unable to do.
The Met Breuer’s two inaugural shows, which will open on March 18, manage to accomplish these hoped-for missions, though very cautiously, without setting off either fireworks or alarms. Of the two, a career survey of the contemporary Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-1990) is the more venturesome, introducing a figure whose name will be new to many Met visitors, though the art-language she speaks, abstraction, will not. The second and larger show, “Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible,” is a classic Met product, updated: an old-master-style historical survey with fabulous loans, a scholarly theme and a new-master twist. Both exhibitions are stimulating experiences, and both would have fit in fine on Fifth Avenue. They leave hanging the question, “Why the Breuer?”
The group show focuses on art that appears to have been left incomplete by its makers, and asks, if it was, Why? Unfinished is relative. Ordinarily, artists stop work when they feel they’ve done enough, even if to an observer it seems they might have kept painting. And sometimes they really do stop short. They hit a creative block, or become overbooked, or grow lazy. Or they die. In certain historical periods, for reasons of philosophy or fashion, unfinished becomes the new finished. More is just too much.
The group show focuses on art that appears to have been left incomplete by its makers, and asks, if it was, Why? Unfinished is relative. Ordinarily, artists stop work when they feel they’ve done enough, even if to an observer it seems they might have kept painting. And sometimes they really do stop short. They hit a creative block, or become overbooked, or grow lazy. Or they die. In certain historical periods, for reasons of philosophy or fashion, unfinished becomes the new finished. More is just too much.
The smallest, a midsize Jacopo Tintoretto, “Doge Alvise Mocenigo (1507-77) Presented to the Redeemer,” illustrates the show’s theme in a literal way: It’s an oil study for some larger painting and never meant to stand on its own. Jacopo Bassano’s towering “Baptism of Christ,” with its penumbral shadows and night-light of a Holy Ghost dove, has some sketchy, not-quite-there passages. It was found in Bassano’s studio and probably in progress when he died in 1592.
Then there’s Titian’s “The Flaying of Marsyas” (1570-76) on its first trip to New York. With it, unanswerables emerge. This horrific image of what is essentially a martyrdom in the cause of art — the satyr Marsyas challenged Apollo to a musical duel, lost, and died a terrible death — is one of Titian’s last paintings, some say his very last. He signed it, but doubts have been raised about whether he’d taken it as far as he wanted, and there’s speculation that other hands later got in on the act. Those hands might account for the contradictory brushwork, as thick as raw meat here, fleecy there. More likely, the textures are evidence of a master tragedian’s extreme rejection of delusions of gleam and polish.
Questions of intent haunt the show. They hover around another of its treasures, Jan van Eyck’s “St. Barbara,” a 1437 metalpoint drawing with the dense, weighted presence of an altarpiece painting. Is that what it was meant to be, an ultravirtuosic preparatory drawing waiting for paint to be added? Or was it conceived to be from the start what it is now — self-sufficient, done?
A few of the show’s more certainly unfinished items — from a sheet of ink drawings by Leonardo da Vinci (a pathological noncompleter) to a smudgy self-portrait by Lucian Freud (the first layer in a buildup of paint that never happened) — at least yield some explanation for their state. A massive Rubens oil sketch was put on permanent hold when a commission fell through. An Alice Neel portrait stalled, half-done, when its subject didn’t show up for a second sitting.
Failure to finish can produce some strange effects. Pier Francesco Mola’s refined 1659 portrait sketch of Pope Alexander VII is all crisp detail from the waist up and all waxy meltdown below. In a mother-daughter portrait by Titian, the woman holds what looks like a bouquet of smoke in one blurry hand. The lavishly dressed and coifed sitter in a portrait by Anton Raphael Mengs has a very long name — Mariana de Silva y Sarmiento, Duquesa de Huescar — but, surrealistically, no face. Ferdinand Hodler’s devastating 1915 watercolor of his dead lover Valentine Godé-Darel, lying in bed, a rosary twisted in her hands, is about the finish as an existential condition, the end of life.
The show’s second half, on the Breuer’s fourth floor, brings us fully into the 20th century, a process-over-product age. And here, with artists using incompletion programmatically, as a tool to work with, the show’s air of mystery somewhat subsides. Early on we have Picasso turning improvisation into a personal style. Yayoi Kusama and Jackson Pollock send allover strokes and patterns beyond the limits of the canvas, to who knows where. Sculptures by Eva Hesse and Alina Szapocznikow, in different ways, pick up on the theme of dissolution broached by Hodler downstairs.
Maybe the selection of artists for this part of the show — Lygia Clark, Cady Noland, Zoe Leonard, Helio Oiticica and Kerry James Marshall (who has a retrospective coming to the Met Breuer this fall) — says something about directions the museum’s acquisitions are taking. Those directions will almost certainly include Ms. Mohamedi. Her only New York museum appearances have been in group shows, beginning in 1998 when the visionary curator Jane Farver brought some pieces to the Queens Museum. At the Breuer, we have the whole sweep of her work in a survey assembled by Ms. Wagstaff with Roobina Karode, director of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi; and Manuel J. Borja-Villel, director of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid.
An artist who inspires admiration and affection (many people who never knew her call her by first name), Ms. Mohamedi was born in a Muslim family in pre-partition Pakistan and lived most of her life in India, with long stays in England, France and Bahrain, where her family had a business. Early in her career, she settled on drawing as a primary medium and abstraction as a mode, unusual choices when the most visible avant-garde Indian art was figurative painting with a political bent.
The work of the abstract painter Vasudeo S. Gaitonde (1924-2001), seen in some depth at the Guggenheim Museum last season, was an inspiration. So, I suspect, was his association of art with a spiritual discipline, in his case related to Zen Buddhism. Ms. Mohamedi is said to have developed her own secular form of meditation to counteract the effects of a neurological disease that gradually compromised her motor powers and led to her death at 56.
The exhibition, installed as series of winding, gray-walled corridors, itself requires concentration, and encourages it. The early paintings and later drawings are modest in size — Ms. Mohamedi worked on a small drafting table — which makes them feel intimate, as does the media she used: ink and graphite on paper, the material of letter-writing. Her fine-drawn linear planes floating in space, or shattering into cascades, feel both timeless and futuristic, calligraphic and architectural. They suggest links to her near-abstract photographs of furrowed fields, structures at Fatehpur Sikri (City of Victory) in Uttar Pradesh, and threads on a loom. Finally, placed throughout the show, are samples of the pocket diaries she carried everywhere and wrote in daily, inking out words to shape a kind of concrete poetry.
As with work by Agnes Martin, to whom she has been compared, Ms. Mohamedi’s art feels rounded-out and complete, but open-ended, too. Her last drawings, which must have demanded superhuman control, are of tiny spaceshiplike chevrons shooting into deep space.
As a project, the Met Breuer is also open-ended, or should be. We can hope that it will use its options well. If it becomes a Met annex, an all-purpose special-exhibition space for solid but formulaic shows, replacing the one the museum relinquished in 2013 to expand its European galleries, that’s not enough. (“Unfinished,” for all its virtues, has a buttoned-up, business-as-usual feel; Ms. Mohamedi’s survey is pioneering without being radical.)
The purposeful mingling of underknown and undersung art from many cultures, in many mediums, will continue to be a basic requirement. (Inviting the jazz musician and composer Vijay Iyer to the Breuer’s Lobby Gallery to perform a composition — his own — in honor of Ms. Mohamedi sounds like a good start.) And it remains crucial that the Met avoids the trap — and it is a trap — of playing a competitive game of contemporary collecting with the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney and the Guggenheim.
Will the Met Breuer be the place to do the great show of African modernism? To explore Latin American — and South Asian — modernism beyond abstraction?
Do what no one else can, or wants to do. Then do it again.
-Holland Cotter