Unfinished ... Works from the Courtauld Gallery review

Bourgeois taste celebrates ‘finished’ art but as this exhibition shows, real poetry lies in a hesitant line, roughly splashed colour and patches of bare canvas

The greatest works of art in the world are unfinished. This is not a provocation. Leonardo da Vinci’s dreamlike, infinitely suggestive sketch of a painting The Adoration of the Magi, Michelangelo’s tortured Prisoners struggling to attain human form from blocks of rough-hewn marble, Cézanne’s fragmentary, unending studies of Mount Sainte-Victoire – for me these unfinished masterpieces literally are the definition of artistic greatness.

Bourgeois taste, in the 19th century and even today, means by contrast a dull admiration for the finished. Glossy paint and spanking enamel. The neatly finished paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites gleam boringly in their frames. Damien Hirst’s dots are drearily perfect. Often, real poetry in art belongs to the hesitant line, to roughly splashed colours and patches of bare canvas.

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