Unfinished Paintings Left to Imagination

Jan van Eyck's St Barbara is very detailed as a sketch

Yesterday before going to see The Met exhibit "Manus x Machina", we went to visit the new Met Breuer, which occupies the building where The Whitney used to be, on 75th Street and Madison Avenue.

The Met Breuer houses modern and contemporary art, and for its inaugural exhibition, the museum had an interesting show called "Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible", on until September 4.

Leonardo's beautiful rendering of a woman

It's an interesting exhibition -- giving visitors a chance to look at paintings or works that aren't finished and try to figure out what the artists' intentions were.

There are 197 works on show, which is a lot to go through, but many of them are interesting and range from Leonardo da Vinci to Rembrandt to Manet, and Andy Warhol.

We were immediately mesmerized by Jan van Eyck's St Barbara made in 1437. The painting is hardly completed and yet the sketch is so detailed that it is beautiful in itself.

Nearby is Leonardo da Vinci's Head and Shoulders of a Woman (La Scapigliata), where the artist has drawn a graceful face of the woman with untamed locks that are not clearly executed, but leaves this to the viewers' imagination.

Just the face and lapdog missing here...

While many have the face or subject clearly defined and painted, leaving the background unfinished, the opposite is true of Anton Raphael Mengs' portrait Mariana de Silva y Sarmiento, Duquesa de Huescar.

Everything from the neck down is painted perfectly, but her face is rubbed out and even her lapdog is left blank. It's kind of disturbing not to be able to see her face, but interesting how the artist approached the painting and wasn't able to complete it.

There's a painting by Gustav Klimt, a posthumous portrait of Ria Munk III, who committed suicide after her fiance called off their engagement. Apparently he worked on her portrait twice before and the family wasn't happy with it and this was the third attempt, but Klimt died before he could finish it.

One has a good idea of what the painting would look completed, with the sumptuous and vivid colours coming through the canvas.

Klimt's beautiful portrait half finished

Paintings by JMW Turner are also in the show, a series of canvases that showcase his signature impressionist style, but they are so blurred that they don't even have any clues of where the painting is set.

On the second floor, the modern art is harder to figure out if it is "finished" or not. Most amusing is Andy Warhol's Do it Yourself (Violin), a paint-by-numbers canvas with only some parts coloured in.

We were pretty tired by the time we got to the second floor; thankfully there were fewer pieces there, but we were pretty brain dead by then.

Nevertheless we quite enjoyed the show. It turns out museums like The Metropolitan receive many works that are unfinished and this is a good opportunity for the museum to showcase these pieces to visitors, who rarely get to see them.

Andy Warhol's paint-by-numbers cheeky painting

They give some insight into the artists' intentions as well as technical artistic methods. Hopefully more curators will consider including these kinds of works when profiling artists or themes to give more depth to the exhibition.

Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible

Until September 4

The Met Breuer

945 Madison Avenue

New York

Chateau Gazing

Chenonceau chateau, with the original tower on the right

This morning we went to visit a beautiful chateau at Chenonceau. It is located in a beautiful idyllic setting and one can imagine royalty arriving by horse-drawn carriage, with immaculately manicured gardens flanking both sides of the castle.

It was owned by Thomas Bohier and his wife Katherine Briconnet. However, Bohier owed money to the crown, and he had to forfeit the property to Henry II.

Catherine de Medici's portrait on the fireplace

He in turn gave the chateau to his mistress Diane de Poitiers, who was apparently 20 years older than him and known for her beautiful skin and red hair. In her bedroom is a portrait of Henry II's wife, Catherine de Medici, who looks very stern, so it seems strange for Diane to have her rival's portrait hanging on her wall, or is it a reminder not to be like Catherine?

After Henry II died, Catherine took her revenge, kicking out Diane and taking over the estate. She held parties in the gallery and covered the area to create more space in the chateau.

The next generation, Henry III occupied the chateau with his wife Louise of Lorraine. However, when he was assassinated, Louise was so distraught that she made her bedroom all black, while she wore white, the royal sign of mourning.

Each of the rooms were very beautifully decorated, and tapestries were more used as ways to insulate rooms, and many of the fireplaces are still in working order. The kitchen was interesting, with lots of copper pots hanging on the walls, as well as knives in the butcher area with a well worn wooden block.

The gallery used for parties and wounded soldiers

There were no washrooms in this chateau -- they used chamber pots and hardly bathed! Also curtains were installed in four-poster beds so that people could have some privacy -- there weren't many corridors so people, from visitors to staff had to pass through other people's rooms to get elsewhere.

There are many interesting details, such as the private chapel, the interlinking C's that almost look like a "D", and the original tile worn out, but the designs can still be seen on the edges of the rooms.

During World War I, the gallery was used as an impromptu hospital for over 2,000 soldiers, and in World War II, its location on the River Cher marks the line of demarcation between the occupied zone and the free zone.

The butcher room with choppers and a worn chopping board

The resistance used the chateau to smuggle people, including Jews from the north to the south in the free zone.

Outside the gardens are very pretty, but use the same plants in the entire design which while pretty, isn't very interesting for green thumb fans. There's also a garden maze, but we didn't have time to go in.

After lunch we visited the chateau at Amboise, a short drive away. It was originally built in the 15th and 16th centuries, and was the home of many kings and queens -- Charles VIII, Francis I, Henry II and Catherine de Medici.

However most of the property is gone, after an owner sold many of the stone blocks to raise money. But what we could still see was impressive.

Leonardo is apparently buried here

We first went into the small St Hubert chapel and in there is apparently the tomb of Leonardo da Vinci. He was asked by Francis I to come to France, and at that time the artist was already 64 years old. Leonardo was not the first Italian architect/artist invited by Francis I, as the others didn't want to come.

It is believed that days before Leonardo died, he called the notary to come and discuss his will and burial arrangements. He asked that he have a simple tombstone and he was apparently buried with one hand behind his head, which is unusual.

However the original church in which he was buried (not far away, on the same grounds) was destroyed, and his corpse was moved again, apparently in this chapel; however we cannot be sure because Leonardo had no descendants so there are no DNA samples to verify this. Our guide believes 95 percent that Leonardo is buried there.

The castle with those in black still existing, in red are gone

Then we made our way into the main building, going through several of the rooms, like the cupbearer's room, where there is a special cabinet storing the king's drinks. Only one person has the key to the cabinet to prevent poisoning.

Another was a long room with vaulted ceilings that would have been used for dining and partying, but also for trials, one case which involved Protestants who were convicted with attempting to assassinate the king and were hung outside the castle for four days so that the public learned a deadly lesson.

However towards the end of our tour some of the rooms were decorated with 19th century furniture, complete with wallpaper and paintings. The landscaped gardens outside are also sculpted, with bushes looking like verdant balls.

A Flemish influence in the architecture of the castle

We survived the day -- reaching 35 degrees! It was still very hot and very bright at 7pm! And it will still be very hot in the next few days.

Visiting Chartres and Chambord

The facade of the cathedral in Chartres

This morning we set off early from Paris to Chartres, southwest of Paris. It is best known for its cathedral, considered to be the best example of French Gothic architecture, and has been a Unesco World Heritage site since 2003.

We were one of the first groups in the cathedral, that was built in the 12th and 13th centuries and is also known for its stained glass windows from the Middle Ages. There are 172 stained glass windows depicting scenes from the Bible.

The Blue Virgin stained glass window

One of them depicts the "Blue Virgin" in a sky blue against a dark blue background. Blue is not a common colour used in stained glass, but here at Chartres it seems to be the norm. The cathedral also houses a piece of the veil of the Virgin Mary... there's a letter in calligraphy that claims it is from the days of Charlemagne...

The stained glass windows are tall and rectangular, and there are two round rose windows as well. The colours are so vivid, but perhaps this is due to the restoration happening at the moment, as there was scaffolding in the cathedral; it also prevented us from seeing the large labyrinth on the floor, which pilgrims used to walk on their knees while praying, as a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

Behind the cathedral is a small garden and below it is a small garden maze and beyond it a panoramic view of the town.

Our next stop was Chambord, to the famous chateau -- or rather a hunting lodge -- that was commissioned by Francis I. He apparently hired Italian architects, one of which may have been Leonardo da Vinci, to create this place that has 440 rooms, 282 fireplaces and 84 staircases. One of them may have been designed by Leonardo, a double helix staircase that goes up three flights, but never meet.

The back of the chateau, or hunting lodge in Chambord

Apparently Francis I wanted the roof of the hunting lodge to look like the skyline of Constantinople. But he didn't spend much time here -- during his 32-year reign (28 years of which were spent on building the lodge), he only spent seven weeks here. Whenever he wanted to visit this home, his 2,000 household staff had to bring all the furniture, clothes and provisions for him to stay here.

Francis I came here to go hunting, and these days people come here to hunt one day a year in November.

Louis XIV spent some time here afterwards and before the outbreak of World War II, the works of art in the Louvre were moved to Chambord for safe keeping from the Germans.

Another interesting factoid is that the chateau was the inspiration for the palace in Disney's animation feature Beauty and the Beast.

The entrance to the chateau a la Constantinople

I have to come back here again to spend more time -- we had to quickly grab lunch before getting on the tour bus again to head toward Tours, but not before we sampled some wines at Montlouis.

It's located inside a limestone quarry, where the rock was quarried for the chateaus in the area. As a result it's a cool place to store wines. However there's no vineyards here -- it's a production area where grapes are processed, blended, fermented, bottled and distributed.

The Loire Valley is known for its Chenin Blanc and sparkling wines. The latter are produced by adding sugar and yeast twice. However the dead yeast leaves a cloudy mixture at the bottom of the bottle and so the bottles are placed on an angle facing down and turned periodically.

See the dead yeast in the bottle that needs to be removed?

Then once the dead yeast has collected at the mouth of the bottle, and because the caves are so cool, the sediment freezes and pops out much easier without losing too much of the sparkling wine.

We got to sample three of the wines, a sparkling wine, a rosee and a white wine, but none of them really impressed us which was strange considering we're in wine country.

By dinnertime we arrived at Tours and had dinner at a fun restaurant called Leonardo da Vinci and were entertained by a guitarist who encouraged us to sing songs either in French or English.

The very grand City Hall in Tours

After dinner we walked around the area, passing by City Hall, the shopping street nearby and saw the modern-looking streetcars. But everything was closed after we finished dinner so we could only window shop!