The Metropolitan Museum Breuer on 75th Street and Madison Avenue (the former site of the Whitney Museum now relocated to hip new quarters downtown) currently features an exhibition that seems perfect
Source: Non Finito | The Smart Set
Paula Marantz Cohen:
I found I often liked the unfinished works on display better than the finished ones that I knew by these artists. Finish has obvious value from the point of view of resale and comprehensibility, but is it as esthetically pleasing or evocative? One could argue that a finished work is often over-finished, and that knowing when to stop is rarer than generally thought.
I also like the invitation of the unfinished work for me to fill it in myself. I also, truth be told, love seeing the scaffolding and architecture, seeing how the rabbit is loaded into the hat.
This may be why I love artist's sketchbooks so much, more so sometimes. I own sketchbooks by Chris Ware, Art Spiegelman, Bill Griffith, Gary Panter, and others; their sketches have an energy, looseness, and immediacy that keeps me turning those pages long after their finished stories remain on my shelf. Also, they don't worry about making them pretty, which makes me feel OK about my own slapdash sketching (though Ware's dashed-off sketches look better and more like finished art than anything I could create in a million billion years).
I remember the comics artist Neal Adams reproducing from his sketchbook examples of his original pencil roughs and then the final product. He remarked in at least two cases that he preferred the roughs to the finished art. I could see his point. Inking the pencils somehow pinned those drawings to the page so heavily that movement and life had been drained. In the roughs, he was working out the problem and the scene looked alive. That mental and physical activity was almost absent in the published panel.
This may be why I adore reading journals, diaries, and letters more than any other genre; verbal sketches, perhaps, quickly done (most of them) and capturing life as it's happening on-the-fly. I feel as if I'm living the life with the person who's writing it down, fast as they can.
