How does an artist know when something’s finished?

The director who starts work on a play isn’t the same as the one who’s finished it, writes Margaret Heffernan. What would be the point of the work if it didn’t touch you?

Gerhard Richter knows a painting is done when he has no more ideas of what to add or to destroy (Getty)

When Olga Tokarchuk had finished her epic novel The Books of Jacob, she smoked a packet of cigarettes she had bought in anticipation of the occasion. It was a strikingly downbeat celebration for eight years of hard labour – “a reward”, she said, “for the phantom theatre director, now that the curtain had fallen.”

Finishing a work is a strange moment for artists. Gerhard Richter knows a painting is done when he has no more ideas of what to add or to destroy. But the moment often catches him by surprise; sometimes, he says, he will work away at a picture over and over again, worrying that it will never be a good painting, when suddenly: it’s done. And he’s pleased.

For Anselm Kiefer, the opposite is true. It’s a hard moment. He isn’t very interested in the end stage, the moment when future possibilities are few. Surrounded by containers of his work going back 50 years, Kiefer doesn’t think about art as a neatly managed project. It’s fluid, he says, a river, never finished, always in process. He sometimes puts his pictures out in the sun or the rain – and the pictures continue to evolve as he leaves them there. The reluctance artists often feel to conclude their work recognises that uncertainty, the puzzle that drew them in, might now be reduced – the work is what it is – but doubts remain.