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Lead book review

Why we love unfinished art

Our fascination with canvases that have been abandoned or deliberately left ‘painterly’ should not blind us to the beauty of the finished work, says Philip Hensher

30 April 2016

9:00 AM

30 April 2016

9:00 AM

Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible Kelly Baum, Andrea Bayer, Sheena Wagstaff and others

Yale, pp.336, £40, ISBN: 9781588395863

The unfinished is, of course, something which tells us about the history of a work of art’s creation. A work of art may have been interrupted by the artist’s death, as with the paintings that Klimt left behind in his studio. Or it may simply have been abandoned when a patron failed to fulfil his obligations, or the painter had grown bored with the subject and moved on to something else.

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