This week, the Morgan Library and Museum opens Hans Memling: Portraiture, Piety and a Reunited Altarpiece (2 September-9 January 2017). The exhibition joins the two inner wings of the Flemish Renaissance master’s Triptych of Jan Crabbe (around 1470)—two of the museum’s treasures—with the other panel of the devotional triptych, which was separated in the 18th century. The show—which also includes portraits by Memling, his contemporaries and followers, drawings and illuminated manuscripts—is a chance to explore his gift for depicting individuals. It also examines his influence on other artists and the connections between panel and manuscript painting during Memling’s time.
Franco-American history buffs will enjoy Benjamin Franklin: Portraits by Duplessis (until 28 November) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, an exhibition of several portraits of the most inventive—and cheekiest—of the Founding Fathers. The show centres on an oil portrait of Franklin in the Met’s collection by the Louis XVI’s official portrait artist, Joseph Siffred Duplessis, painted after Franklin came to Paris in 1776 as the US's first ambassador to France. A exceptional, rarely-seen pastel study for the work, borrowed from the New York Public Library, is also included. This depiction of Franklin eventually made its way onto the current $100 bill.
This is the last week to see Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible at the Met Breuer (until 4 September), with nearly 200 works that are “incomplete”, whether by the artist’s deliberate choice (“non finito”) or the intervention an outside force (sometimes death). The theme pulls together pieces by a wide range of artists from the Renaissance to the present day, including Titian, Rembrandt, Picasso, Lygia Clark and Robert Gober. Some works reveal the skeletons underneath the artistic process, such as the anatomical outlines of humans and horses in Henri IV at the Battle of Ivry (around 1620-30) by Rubens. Others are downright jarring, like the nearly-blank oval where a face should be in the Portrait of Mariana de Silva y Sarmiento, duquesa de Huescar (1775) by Anton Raphael Mengs.
Three other must-see shows: Dadaglobe Reconstructed at the Museum of Modern Art; Alma Thomas at the Studio Museum in Harlem; The Keeper at the New Museum.