When news first circulated that the Metropolitan Museum was to lease Marcel Breuer’s building from its original occupant, The Whitney Museum of American Art, the word was that the Madison Avenue facility would be the Met’s new contemporary wing. We should be grateful, on the evidence of its opening exhibitions, that that does not appear to be the plan. Contemporary art needs to remain visible and vital at 1000 Fifth Avenue for the Met to thrive fully as a encyclopedic museum, for there is nothing like being able to see the work of a living artist within close proximity to achievements of distant eras, to be reminded of continuities and ruptures alike, of shifting aspirations and perennial concerns.

Breuer’s architecture is sold short, furthermore, if we think these sumptuously grave galleries are exclusively suited to modernist and contemporary art. As in the museums of Louis Kahn, the dark, rich timbres of exposed concrete and raw slate beautifully offset the textures of many kinds of art and artifact. Just as high modernism looks startling and fresh in classical settings, so too, anything from medieval armor to Mughal miniatures can take on unexpected resonances in stark modernist surroundings. A case in point: Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas. Although arguably a little cramped and deserving a wall of its own, the Venetian master’s late glory is the magisterial opening salvo of Met Breuer’s inaugural survey exhibition, “Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible.” It is an incredible privilege to see this picture in New York City.

It feels unsporting to spoil the celebration with an inconvenient observation, but this painting is surely not unfinished. “Unfinished” (a title and concept that recall the New Museum’s 2007 re-launch exhibition, “Unmonumental”) is an audacious and enterprising way of connecting the satellite with the mother ship. Emphasizing art of the last 150 years while sustaining broader historical attention, the exhibition draws a thematic thread from old master tradition into contemporary sensibility. But by what specific criteria is The Flaying of Marsyas unfinished? It is a painting in the fast, loose, bravura old-age style of Titian, but if every aspect of a picture’s demeanor is meant and felt by its author (and the style of this painting is totally commensurate with contemporary works by Titian) why should its lively, self-consciously ambiguous painterliness be designated “unfinished”?

Maybe it would have been better to title the show “Unfinish” — in the present tense. This would suggest a proto-provisionalism in the colorito of Titian’s late touch and to justify the whole range of intentionality in the works this survey assembles. Provisionalism is, of course, a hot button contemporary label that makes the nonagenarian Renaissance master sound like a Bushwick hipster, but the term is no more anachronistic that the likes of “romantic” and “impressionistic” which would have been the natural ways to describe Titian’s late surfaces not so long ago. Of course, there are many works in this exhibition that were abandoned, or just meant as sketches, or in some fashion disrupted, and the process and pictorial thinking laid bare is indeed illuminating. But the key problem with “unfinish” as deployed here is that it privileges tightness, all-overness and gloss — literal “finish,” as in signed and sealed — as somehow yardsticks of artistic accomplishment, or the norm from which the plethora of artists in this show are deviating. But these are good problems for an exhibition to have because they have us pay attention to surface, think deeply about intentionality, and allow for disruption of canonical successions and period divisions.

Even more encouraging and heartening is the choice of artist for the first solo presentation at Met Breuer. Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-90) was a minimalist of exquisite poise, rigor and resoluteness. This comprehensive retrospective focuses on her graphic works and monochrome paintings. The quiet austerity of her vision is the perfect complement to Breuer’s dignified architectural understatement. But more significant is the defiance of marketing expectation on the part of the Met’s curators in choosing a relatively unknown artist from outside the international mainstream and contemporary fashion: “difficult” art in “slow” mediums. It signals, let’s hope, that Met Breuer is to be placed at the service of the best that museum scholarship can come up with, defeating any sense that modern and contemporary equals flashy and populist.

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September. 18 to December 20, 2003

The photographs of Nasreen Mohamedi are a recent supplement to the drawings of this underknown Indian artist/ photographer/ writer. Fascinating in and of themselves, these 25 silver gelatin prints are being exhibited for the first time at Talwar Gallery. Some of Mohamedi’s photos were concurrently on view in “The Last Picture Show,” an exhibition of conceptual photography curated by Douglas Fogle for the Walker Art Center. Fogle became aware of Mohamedi’s photographs through Talwar Gallery’s director, who represents the artist’s estate.

Mohamedi was born in 1937 in a province of India which is now part of Pakistan. Trained in India, England, and France, where she came under the influence of the writer Helene Cixous, she was also a devotee of Zen. Mohamedi made drawings and took photographs as she traveled through Eastern and European cultures during the 1960s – 1980s. From the age of 22 until the end of her life, her poem-like diary entries reflect on the world while she moves within it as observer, artist, and participant. An example from 1988 reads:

Curve
Curve slowly coming to O.
Silence oasis in acoustic parks.

The vast scale of her images, materialized in silver gelatin prints no bigger than 11″ x 14″, belies the intimately subjective view through the camera that she maintains over her lifetime. Paradox is at the heart of her images. They describe a sublime and indeterminate realm on the periphery of iconic representation. A zeppelin shaped ellipse of light lifts off from the horizon below; tiny lights on the slim ground plane are all that anchor it. The linear qualities of closeup taut threads on a loom curiously, cottony, resemble orthogonal lines of perspective converging on an infinite point. Traffic lines painted on the street in Japan, together with characters for stop or slow, are depicted from the angle at which their distortion is most elongated. Terrace planting seen from a great distance and sand patterns also read as ambiguous in scale. The mobile, camera-assisted observer constructs outposts and touchstones by directing the photographic gaze toward an interiorized vision wherever she goes. As we befriend her vision, the world is both larger and smaller than we normally experience it.

The last prints in the exhibition correspond to the final years of Mohamedi’s life. They are extremely reductive and simply composed. Mohamedi photographed arched doorways from deep inside an architectural space. In these prints, the jet black, soft-edged shape of an arched doorway rests alone on a white expanse of paper. The extreme ends of the photographic process were the focus of her final experiments.

Does Mohamedi’s photographic work belong to conceptual photography, is it a lost body of work recovered? Fogle’s curatorial expertise says it is. So does Indian curator and writer Geeta Kapur, who places Mohamedi in the avant garde of Indian art in her recent book When was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India. (New Delhi, 2000). Opposing Kapur’s postmodern approach, Tapati Guha-Thakurta argues for a more traditionally modernist contemporary art history of Indian art rich in a different political and aesthetic critique. More will be written about Nasreen Mohamedi in the near future. Meanwhile, her work and writing are an emerging treasure in the west.

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