Take a break from seeking definitive answers. In the Haggerty Museum of Art’s current exhibitions — Tina Barney’s “The Europeans” and Philip Guston’s “Inevitable Finality” — they don’t exist.

That’s the beauty of Barney’s photographs and Guston’s prints — they invite interpretation. Populating the Haggerty’s entire first floor until the end of the semester, these exhibitions challenge students to fill in the blanks.

Photographing the subjects in their affluent homes in Austria, Germany, Spain, France and Italy, Barney’s “The Europeans” resembles classic portraiture in their sumptuousness and are “very painterly,” said Lynne Shumow, curator of education at the Haggerty.

Yet each portrait contains a contemporary twist. By displaying subjects in a candid moment or unexpected pose, “there are portraits within portraits,” said Alexandrea Newell, a senior in the College of Arts & Sciences and student guard at the Haggerty Museum.

Barney, an American photographer, exacerbates the mystery of each portrait by omitting the subjects’ names. Most portraits are titled after an element within the scenery like “The Orchids” or “The Tapestry.”

Such scenic elements are as crucial to the photograph as the persons in it.  In “The Orchids,” Barney blurs the floral arrangements to draw attention away from them and back to the men photographed, yet your eye dances between both.

The story behind “The Tapestry” is one of the most enigmatic. The woman standing in the photo’s center is stoic and alone. Her eyes gaze to a diagonal corner of the room, while her posture parallels those of the soldiers’ in the tapestry behind her. Now fill in the blank.

According to Shumow, both Barney and Guston’s exhibitions require audiences to be critical and analytical lookers.

Unlike Barney’s portraits, which possess rich color and texture, Guston’s “Inevitable Finality” lithographic prints are black and white. Lithography is simply a printing process—from drawing on stone to what you see on the walls.

Guston was heavily influenced by the Holocaust and Vietnam, Newell said, but those suggestions are never directly expressed. His subject matter is a combination of recognizable objects and abstraction. “East Side” contains the refreshing realism of a light bulb, window frame and side door. It’s a sharp comparison to the combative and anxiety-laden “Sky,” which shows a multitude of overlapping fists holding shields blurred into what looks like a mountain range.

“It’s a whole vocabulary of images, but the artist is not exactly telling you what the vocabulary is,” Shumow said.

The pictures are about shapes and the actual use of the line, rather than explicit subjects. In one print, “Group,” the images appear to be protruding elbows connected to arms that reach down to metal horseshoes, all positioned in front of wave-like lines — but even that’s not an absolute description.

“It’s not one thing or another because it can’t be,” Newell said. “It’s intentionally vague.”

Sidney B. Felsen, one of the owners of Gemini G.E.L. studio, which facilitated the print-making process, took a series of photographs of Guston in his studio. The photographs accompany Guston’s exhibition in the Haggerty, giving viewers a window into his artistic process.

“The artist is no longer invisible,” Newell said. “Most studios don’t show the entire artistic process.”

Joining these exhibitions are nine film portraits entitled “Marriage” by John Stezaker. The British artist paired Hollywood celebrities from the Golden Age, the time between the late ’20s to the early ’60s, and spliced their faces together to create a completely new caricature.

Stezaker’s execution may seem simple, but there is art in his process. Stezaker sifted through thousands of photographs and meticulously chose each one by hand. This concept of “slowing down” explores the roots of the original process of photography, Shumow said, in comparison to today’s digital age.

In layering the two photos to create one face, Shumow said Stezaker is “speaking to the subtleties of gaze and movement of the face.”

“At first I did not like them,” said John Loscuito, a graduate student in the College of Management and registrar at the Haggerty Museum. “But the more I look at them, they really start to wear on me.”

Loscuito asks viewers to consider a few questions when looking at this collection: Who are the celebrities? Does it matter if you know them? Are they interchangeable? More broadly, do people (in general) start to blend?

Shumow encourages students to compare the current exhibitions with older works in the Haggerty’s permanent collection, which are also on display. Perhaps in this comparison, students can build responses to the open-ended questions that seem to define Stezaker, Guston and Barney’s works.