The Unfinished Painting

Throughout history, works of art have been left unfinished, for a wide variety of reasons. Some of these have, over time, become as valuable—or more—as completed works by the same artist. Spanning the 15th to the 20th centuries, The Unfinished Painting looks at 50 such works by old and modern masters, including Van Eyck, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Gilbert Stuart, Manet, Cézanne, Matisse, and Mondrian, and exposes the reason for each one’s abandonment, from the illness or death of the artist to war, lack of funds for materials, cancelled commissions, or dissatisfaction with the subject or medium. A discussion of the way unfinished works from centuries ago—some crude, some unpolished, some simply abandoned ideas—have influenced modern paintings in styles ranging from Cubism to Abstraction accompanies superb colorplates, revealing the past from an unusual vantage point.

Praise for The Unfinished Painting:

“Marshaling famous and obscure examples . . . Van Hout tracks the unfinished painting into the modern era, when non-finito techniques such as Impressionism and Cubism become their own means to an end.” —Art + Auction