The Brooklyn Museum has opened its doors to the most significant Claude Monet exhibition in New York in over 25 years, focusing on a lesser-known but pivotal period in the Impressionist master's career. "Monet and Venice," which opened on October 11, showcases more than half of the 37 remarkable paintings Monet created during his transformative three-month sojourn to the Italian city in 1908-1909.
The exhibition comes at a time when Monet was facing a significant creative crisis. In 1908, the revolutionary artist who had transformed French art history three decades earlier found himself unable to complete his latest Water Lilies paintings to his satisfaction. His dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, recognized the problems with these new entries in the series, leading Monet to delay and ultimately cancel an exhibition at Durand-Ruel's Paris gallery. The artist eventually abandoned the entire Water Lilies series temporarily.
However, by 1909, Monet had experienced a remarkable renaissance. Refreshed and reinvigorated by his Venice experience, he made an unexpected and triumphant return to the Water Lilies series, approaching it with renewed confidence and skill. Well into his 60s, Monet was experiencing what would prove to be one of his most important late-career breakthroughs.
The Venice trip, initially resisted by Monet who considered the city an artistic clichΓ©, came about largely due to the persistent requests of his wife, Alice HoschedΓ©. The couple stayed at the Palazzo Barbaro as guests of Baroness Mary Hunter, with the palazzo's owners, Daniel and Ariana Curtis, immortalized in a John Singer Sargent painting featured in the current exhibition.
Curators Lisa Small and Melissa Buron have created a comprehensive 100-work survey that centers almost exclusively on Monet's Venice series, complemented by other artistic interpretations of the floating city. These include vedute cityscapes by Canaletto and canal paintings by J.M.W. Turner, providing crucial context for understanding Monet's revolutionary approach to depicting Venice.
The exhibition demonstrates how Monet consciously worked against established artistic traditions. While widely circulated photographs presented a static, peaceful Venice, and Canaletto's paintings were so detailed they appeared photographic, Monet's version of the city pulses with motion and energy. His canvases are deliberately vague and smudgy, moving his artistic practice even closer to abstraction than his previous works.
Monet maintained his plein air painting tradition in Venice, continuing the outdoor approach that had made Impressionism so transgressive during the 1870s and 1880s. However, he adopted a new and rigorous work schedule, painting his Venetian subjects during the same two-hour daily span rather than returning to subjects at different times of day as he had famously done with Rouen Cathedral and his haystack series.
This methodical approach resulted in paintings that capture meteorological shifts and atmospheric changes with unprecedented subtlety. In his paintings of the Palazzo Ducale as seen from the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, viewers can observe how embankments shift from bluish-gray to bruised purple, while the palace itself moves in and out of focus depending on weather conditions and light quality.
One of the most striking examples in the exhibition is "The Rio della Salute" (1908), where Monet deliberately confuses the boundary between the purple walls of a palazzo and the water below, creating a complex tangle of paint strokes that makes it impossible to distinguish where the building ends and the natural environment begins.
The exhibition's impact extends beyond the Venice paintings themselves to demonstrate their crucial influence on Monet's later masterpieces. The Water Lilies works created after his Venice experience, including a stunning piece from around 1914-17 on loan from the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, show lilies rendered as swirls of unevenly mixed pink and red paint, with semi-translucent lime green pads that seem to exist both above and below the water simultaneously.
While the Brooklyn Museum has included some signature elements that have drawn criticism from art critics in recent exhibitions – including an introductory "multisensory space" complete with gondola videos, special lighting effects, and a custom scent available for purchase – the core exhibition represents serious scholarship and curatorial achievement.
The show's grand finale features a dedicated room for the Venice series, set in a blue-carpeted gallery with a newly commissioned score by Niles Luther. However, as the exhibition persuasively argues, Monet's greatest achievement with the Venice works was not necessarily the paintings themselves, but how they enabled him to create some of his finest later works, including the Water Lilies paintings that now fill an entire gallery at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.
As Alice HoschedΓ© wrote during their Venice stay, the city "has got hold of him and won't let go." Tragically, she died in 1911, before she could witness how profoundly correct her observation would prove to be. The exhibition will travel to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco next year, continuing to share this revelation about a crucial but underappreciated chapter in one of art history's most celebrated careers.
