| The Most Famous Unfinished work of Art | |
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The Mysterious Stranger
The Mysterious Friend is an unfinished work and the last novel attempted by the American author Mark Twain. It was worked on periodically from roughly 1890 up until his death in 1910. The body of work is a serious social commentary by Twain addressing his ideas of the Moral Sense and the "damned human race". The Mystery of Edwin Drood
The Mystery of Edwin Drood is the final novel by Charles Dickens. The novel was left unfinished at the time of Dickens' death and thus how it might have ended remains unknown. The novel is named after Edwin Drood but it mostly tells the story of his uncle, a choirmaster named John Jasper, who is in love with his pupil, Rosa Bud. Miss Bud is Drood's fiancée, and has also caught the eye of the high-spirited and hot-tempered Neville Landless, who comes from Ceylon with his twin sister, Helena. Neville Landless and Drood take a dislike to one another the moment they meet. Drood later disappears in mysterious circumstances and Dickens' death before he completed the story means that what happened to him remains a mystery for real. Summa Theologica
The Summa Theologica or simply the Summa, written 1265–1274 is the most famous work of Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274), although it was never finished. It was intended as a manual for beginners as a compilation of all of the main theological teachings of the time. It summarizes the reasoning for almost all points of Christian theology in the West, which, before the Protestant Reformation, subsisted solely in the Roman Catholic Church. The Summa's topics follow a cycle: the existence of God, God's creation, Man, Man's purpose, Christ, the Sacraments, and back to God. It is famous for its five arguments for the existence of God, the Quinquae viae (Latin: five ways). Throughout his work, Aquinas cites Augustine of Hippo, Aristotle, and other Christian, Jewish and even Muslim and ancient pagan scholars. Unfinished portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt
The Unfinished Portrait is a water color of Franklin Delano Roosevelt that was in progress at the time of his collapse and subsequent death. Elizabeth Shoumatoff had begun working on the portrait of the president around noon on April 12, 1945. FDR was being served lunch when he stated "I have a terrific headache" and then collapsed of a massive cerebral hemorrhage. Later that day Roosevelt died. Shoumatoff never finished the portrait. The Unfinished Portrait hangs at Roosevelt's former health and relaxation retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia, known as the Little White House. Later, Shoumatoff decided to finish the portrait in FDR's memory. She painted a new painting identical to the first one based on memory and almost perfect. The one difference is that the tie that was red in the original is now blue. All other aspects are completely identical, albeit the first painting is only partially complete. The finished portrait now resides in the Legacy Exhibit beside the original at the Little White House Historic Site in Warm Springs, GA.
The Athenaeum
 Gilbert Stuart is widely considered to be one of America's foremost portraitists. His best known work, the unfinished portrait of George Washington that is sometimes referred to as The Athenaeum, was begun in 1796 and left incomplete at the time of Stuart's death in 1828. The image of George Washington featured in the painting has appeared on the United States one-dollar bill for over one century.
Gran Cavallo
 Leonardo da Vinci developed sketches and models for the 24 foot-tall "Gran Cavallo" horse statue but the bronze to cast the sculpture was diverted to make cannons. Five hundred years later, two full-size sculptures were completed based on Leonardo's work.
Transfiguration
 The Transfiguration is considered the last painting by the Italian High Renaissance master Raphael. It was left unfinished by Raphael, and is believed to have been completed by his pupil, Giulio Romano, shortly after Raphael's death in 1520. The picture is now housed in the Pinacoteca Vaticana of the Vatican Museum in the Vatican City.
Adoration of the Magi
 The Adoration of the Magi is an early painting by Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo was given the commission by the Augustinian monks of San Donato a Scopeto in Florence, but departed for Milan the following year, leaving the painting unfinished. It has been in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence since 1670.
The marble tomb of Pope Julius II
 In 1505 Michelangelo was invited back to Rome by the newly elected Pope Julius II. He was commissioned to build the Pope's tomb. Under the patronage of the Pope, Michelangelo had to constantly stop work on the tomb in order to accomplish numerous other tasks. Because of these interruptions, Michelangelo worked on the tomb for 40 years. The tomb, of which the central feature is Michelangelo's statue of Moses, was never finished to Michelangelo's satisfaction. It is located in the Church of S. Pietro in Vincoli in Rome.
Ryugyong Hotel
 The Ryugyong Hotel is a 105-floor supertall skyscraper under construction in Pyongyang, North Korea. The hotel is currently topped-out and scheduled to become the second-tallest hotel in the world when it is completed in 2012.
Construction began in 1987 but was halted in 1992 due to the government's financial difficulties. The unfinished hotel remained untouched until April 2008, when construction resumed after being inactive for 16 years.
Palace of the Soviets
 The Palace of the Soviets was a project to construct an administrative center and a congress hall in Moscow, Russia, near the Kremlin, on the site of the demolished Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. The architectural contest for the Palace of the Soviets (1931-1933) was won by Boris Iofan's neoclassical concept, subsequently revised by Iofan, Vladimir Shchuko and Vladimir Gelfreikh into a supertall skyscraper. If built, it would have become the world's tallest structure. Construction started in 1937, and was terminated by the German invasion in 1941. In 1941-1942, its steel frame was disassembled for use in fortifications and bridges. Construction was never resumed. In 1958, the foundations of the Palace were converted into what would become the world's largest open-air swimming pool. The Cathedral was rebuilt in 1995-2000.
Symphony No. 8
 Franz Schubert's Symphony No. 8 in B minor commonly known as the "Unfinished Symphony" was started in 1822 but left with only two movements known to be complete, even though Schubert would live for another six years. A scherzo, nearly completed in piano score but with only two pages orchestrated, also survives. It has long been theorized that Schubert may have sketched a finale which instead became the big B minor entr'acte from his incidental music to Rosamunde, but all the evidence for this is circumstantial. One possible reason for Schubert's leaving the symphony incomplete is the predominance of the same meter (three-in-a-bar). The first movement is in 3/4, the second in 3/8 and the third (an incomplete scherzo) also in 3/4. Three movements in a row in exactly the same meter occur hardly at all in the symphonies, sonatas or chamber works of the great Viennese composers (a rare example is Haydn's Farewell Symphony).
Requiem
The Requiem Mass in D minor by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was composed in Vienna in 1791, during the last year of the composer's life. The requiem was Mozart's last composition and is one of his most popular and respected works, although the question of how much of the music Mozart managed to complete before his death and how much was later composed by Franz Xaver Süssmayr or others is still debated.
The Art of Fugue
The Art of Fugue is an incomplete masterpiece by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750). The work was most likely started at the beginning of the 1740s, if not earlier. The first known surviving version, which contained 12 fugues and 2 canons, was copied by the composer in 1745. This manuscript has a slightly different title, added afterwards by his son-in-law Johann Christoph Altnickol. Bach's second version was published in 1751 after his death. It contains 14 fugues and 4 canons. "The governing idea of the work," as the eminent Bach specialist Christoph Wolff put it, is "an exploration in depth of the contrapuntal possibilities inherent in a single musical subject."
Smile (The Beach Boys album)
 Smile is an unreleased album by The Beach Boys, and perhaps the most famous unreleased rock and roll album of all time. Recorded throughout 1966 and 1967, the project was intended by its creator Brian Wilson as the follow-up to The Beach Boys' influential album Pet Sounds, but was never completed in its original form. The project was resurrected in 2003, and a newly recorded version was released by Beach Boys composer and leader Wilson in 2004. During the 37 years from its cancellation to the release of Wilson's version, Smile acquired considerable mystique, and bootlegged tracks from the never-completed album are circulated widely among Beach Boys collectors. Many of the tracks which were originally recorded for Smile eventually found their way onto subsequent Beach Boys albums.
Game of Death
 The Game of Death was the film Bruce Lee had planned to be the demonstration piece of his martial art Jeet Kune Do. Over 100 minutes of footage was shot before his death, some of which was later misplaced in the Golden Harvest archives, and has not yet been recovered (such as one fighter attacking Dan Inosanto with a thin log). The remaining footage has been released with Bruce Lee's original English and Cantonese dialogue, with John Little himself dubbing Bruce Lee's Hai Tien character as part of the documentary entitled Bruce Lee: A Warrior's Journey. Most of the footage which was shot, is from what was to be the centerpiece of the film.
While in the middle of filming The Game of Death, Bruce Lee was given the offer to star in Enter the Dragon. The first kung fu film to be produced by a Hollywood studio, and with a budget unprecedented for the genre, it was an offer Lee couldn't refuse. Unfortunately, Lee died of cerebral edema before the film's release. At the time of his death, he had already made plans to resume the filming of The Game of Death.
The Other Side of the Wind
The Other Side of the Wind is an unfinished film directed by Orson Welles and starring John Huston, Peter Bogdanovich, Dennis Hopper and Oja Kodar. The film features Huston as an aging Hollywood director modeled on Ernest Hemingway, who is trying to make a hip, with-it film in the early seventies, laden with sex and violence, to revive his flagging career.
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Comments
thanks www.allstatespublicadjusters.com
oops,
forgot the link
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5nAxzH4OPs
heres another one I thought of. scorcese films a few scraps of a hitchcock script that mr hitchcock never got to complete
Nice read though, as I was unaware of some.
I saw a Gilbert Stuart painting in someone's home years ago. They had discovered it in their attic. Notified the local museum. The museum did not want to acquire it. After some research the finder of the painting discovered that the museum had indeed owned it many years before and was entirely unaware to the fact.
the day the clown cried.