What’s in the box? The Met Breuer opens new possibilities in a dramatic art space

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NEW YORK — When the elevator doors open and you find yourself on the third floor of what was until recently the Whitney Museum, you are confronted by wall-to-wall Renaissance masters. Giant paintings by Jacopo Bassano and Titian, including the latter’s “The Agony in the Garden” and “The Flaying of Marsyas,” loom before you, and it feels like that disorienting moment when you wake up confused in a strange hotel room. Didn’t all of this used to look different?

On Friday, the Upper East Side building that served as the home of the Whitney from 1966 to 2014 will reopen to the public as the Met Breuer, an expansion space for shows that don’t fit into the galleries, or established curatorial focus, of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s landlocked campus on Fifth Avenue. When the Whitney moved to its new building in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, its old building, the historic Marcel Breuer-designed brutalist masterpiece, was up for grabs. The Whitney has given the Met an eight-year lease on the space, which it will use to focus on the display of 20th- and 21st-century art.

It is a major expansion for the already enormous Met, which has an annual operating budget of $370 million and is far and away the largest art museum in this country. The addition of the Breuer means that the Met is now steward to three major properties, including the Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park, which houses a separate collection of medieval art and artifacts. But the Breuer isn’t just about real estate. It is a self-conscious attempt by the Met to reinvent itself, attract new audiences and shake off some of that slightly fusty smell that some people detect no matter how hard the Met tries to keep up with trends and fads.

[The Whitney begins a new era in a new home, in a city that is ever new]

And so why is a visitor’s likely first encounter with the newly minted Met Breuer an eye-popping display of 16th-century art? Because institutional identities are more resilient than anything a mere satellite space can change. The Met is launching the Met Breuer with two exhibitions, one that feels like the Met uncomfortably dipping its toe into new waters, “Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible,” which includes the Old Master paintings; and the other, devoted to the Indian abstract artist Nasreen Mohamedi, which demonstrates how well this new endeavor could work, if the Met tweaks things a bit.

“Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible” takes a shopworn idea — that both deliberately and unintentionally unfinished art works often have extraordinary expressive power — and pursues it through more than 500 years of art. With works borrowed from museums around the world, and supplemented with material from the Met’s vast holdings, the exhibition methodically covers almost all the bases, from works that were found incomplete in the studio after the death of an artist to works that intentionally indulge an “unfinished” look to create contrast and mystery, to recent and contemporary works that explore such ideas as infinitude and philosophical notions of self-sufficiency, completion and limitlessness.

There are jaw-dropping works throughout. The two mighty Titians at the entrance are only the beginning, with two more Titian portraits and “Tarquin and Lucretia,” borrowed from the Gemaldegalerie in Vienna. A small Parmigianino from the Louvre is one of the sketchiest, and most haunting, paintings on view, and another small work, Jan van Eyck’s “Saint Barbara,” drives home with trumpets and timpani the not-surprising central thesis of the show: that unfinished works can transcend fully realized ones in power and perfection.

On the fourth floor, the exhibition continues with a raft of major Picassos, including an arresting image of Harlequin, from 1923, in which most of his body is sketched in with hatching lines while his face and one corner of his costume have been painted. The Renaissance idea of the “non finito,” which originally referred to individual works left unfinished, has yielded to a virtuoso aesthetic of mixing the finished with the provisional, fully articulated passages juxtaposed with intimations and quiet suggestions.

As the 20th century progressed and on to the current moment, artists began to pursue not just the visual effects of unfinished work, but also the philosophical ideas implied by boundlessness, mortality and the “finishing” that goes on between the audience and the work itself. A short animated 1992 film by Jorge Macchi and David Oubiña, “Zeno’s Arrow,” can stand for many of the works that pursue the conceptual implications of the “unfinished”: The viewer sees a traditional film countdown to the beginning of the feature, with the numbers descending until they get to 1, after which the countdown proceeds by halves, until the line of decimals is so long and so small that it fades into a blur. One of the paradoxes posed by Zeno, a pre-Socratic philosopher, claimed that one could never reach a destination because “That which is in locomotion must arrive at the half-way point before it arrives at the goal.”

The visitor may feel like that, too, as the exhibition seems to march on relentlessly. In fact, it’s not about the size of the show, but the spirit. The Met has the resources, financial and curatorial, not just to tease out a few strands of the idea of “unfinished” art, but also to run it down, tackle it, bind it and flay it down to its lifeless particulars, like poor Marsyas. And so, despite its many virtues, the show partakes more of the humorless old Met — diligent, thorough and exhaustive — than any new spirit of what the Met Breuer might become.

[At the new Broad Museum: Vulgar art, but some quiet spaces]

For that, spend time with the Mohamedi show, which is magnificent. The artist, who died in 1990, used drafting equipment to create works of astonishing subtlety, faintly traced pencil drawings that have both architectural and musical overtones. Small deviations from perfect regularity set up cascading patterns, as if an Agnes Martin painting began pulsing like the ripples on the surface of a pond. The exhibition includes more than 130 drawings, paintings and photographs.

The photographs are particularly intriguing, making explicit some of the delicate architectural suggestions of the drawings. All Mohamedi needed to make an image was a basic geometrical idea, which her camera often detected in landscapes that were otherwise arid and ugly. There’s something immeasurably touching about the way her camera found beauty in the world, and her drawing concentrated that beauty into something entirely new; the photographs don’t ground her abstraction in the world, but connect it to worldly ideas, like kindness, gentleness and delicacy.

The show feels especially happy on the second floor of the Breuer building, where it is mostly contained in windowless galleries under relatively low light. This is an atmosphere that anyone who loved the old Whitney will remember, cloisterlike and contemplative, a quiet refuge from chaos of the city. It is a balm after the urgent blockbuster importuning of the larger and louder “Unfinished” show just above.

So the Met Breuer can work, offering something one would never expect to find at the other Met franchises, in a smart, coherent, absorbing way. The institution now has a lot of new space, and almost a decade to program it. The “less is more” Mohamedi exhibition suggests that the museum knows how to find the path, but will it take it?

The Met Breuer opens Friday in New York City. For information, visit metmuseum.org/visit/met-breuer.