Seeking closure | 13 August 2015

A while ago, David Hockney mused on a proposal to tax the works of art stored in artists’ studios. ‘You’d only have to say they weren’t finished, and you are the only one who could say if they were,’ he suggested. ‘There’d be nothing they could do.’ This is the state of affairs examined in Unfinished, a thought-provoking little exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery.

Once upon a time, it was as clear whether a painter had completed a picture as it was whether the gardener had thoroughly mowed the lawn. Indisputably, Perino del Vaga downed tools for some reason halfway through his ‘Holy Family with Saint John the Baptist’ (1528–37). That’s obvious. Some parts are depicted in fine detail, others remain merely drawn outlines on the panel. Yet someone kept it because, even as it is, it’s beautiful.

This is where the topic begins to get complicated. There was a rather crass definition of ‘finished’ that was upheld, for example, at the 19th-century Royal Academy. It meant, roughly, ‘neatly and smoothly brushed all over’ (or polished, in the case of a sculpture). Thus the young Constable was told his landscape required more ‘finish’. But there are many other ways to bring a work to a conclusion.

It seems Rembrandt was the first to proclaim the Hockney doctrine: that a picture was finished if and only if he, its creator, said so. But this generates paradoxes. Why did Rembrandt leave his etching ‘The Artist Drawing from the Model’ (c.1639) as evidently ‘unfinished’ as the Perino del Vaga, with large areas of the plate just barely sketched in outline but about a third carefully elaborated? Perhaps he wasn’t happy with the composition — but in that case, why did he go ahead and print it? Surely it couldn’t be that he actually liked the image as it was? But its blend of ‘finished’ and ‘unfinished’ was fascinating enough to have influenced Picasso’s meditations on the theme of artist and model in ‘The Vollard Suite’.