The Brooklyn Museum's latest blockbuster exhibition, "Monet and Venice," offers visitors an intimate look at a brief but pivotal period in Claude Monet's artistic career. The show focuses on the renowned Impressionist's three-month stay in Venice in 1908, during which he created 37 paintings that would help bridge his earlier works with his famous water lily series. Curated by Lisa Small and Melissa Buron, the exhibition runs through February 1, 2026, and features 19 paintings from Monet's Venice period alongside works from different stages of his career.
The exhibition successfully contextualizes this lesser-known chapter of Monet's life, revealing how the artist and his wife, Alice Hoschedé, experienced Venice during their singular visit to the floating city. Monet visited Venice only once, and somewhat reluctantly at Alice's urging, but the city proved to be the ideal environment for exploring the relationship between water and light that had long fascinated him. The curators have done an excellent job of bringing both historical context and personal dimension to the display through wall texts and archival materials.
Earlier works in the exhibition demonstrate Monet's evolving treatment of water as a subject. In "Rising Tide at Pourville" (1882), viewers can observe Monet rendering water as a viscerally material element, with waves appearing as thick, vigorous brushstrokes and rows of white froth that seem almost palpable as they collide with the brilliant green cliff and small cottage above. The nearby "Sailboats on the Seine at Petit-Gennevilliers" (1874) presents a contrasting approach, showing boats floating on a slick, almost gelatinous surface with a composition that creates a cohesive tableau of liquid, solid, and vapor.
The Venice paintings reveal a dramatic shift in Monet's artistic approach, where the physical reality of the city seems to dissipate into water and air. Wall texts note that Monet was particularly intrigued by water's ability to change states, and this fascination is evident in works such as "The Rio della Salute" (1908). In this painting, luminous orange-red buildings lining a minor canal occupy most of the picture plane, but halfway down, the architecture disintegrates into a whirlwind of brushstrokes that mirror the looseness of the water below, while the water on the opposite side appears to rise and evaporate into the air.
The exhibition reaches its climax with ten Venice paintings displayed in a circular arrangement reminiscent of how Monet's water lilies are shown at Paris's Musée de l'Orangerie. These works present different iterations of the same few views, creating an immersive experience for visitors. One Grand Canal painting, dominated by light blue oils that texturally evoke oil pastel, draws viewers into the hazy waterway where the dome of Santa Maria della Salute barely reveals itself like a pearly phantom composed of sun and shadow. The liquid reflections of barge poles dissolve the wood into gleaming specks of green and white.
The final room features an atmospheric addition in the form of music by composer-in-residence Niles Luther, which bears resemblance to the Mahler refrain from Luchino Visconti's 1971 film "Death in Venice." While the score adds ambiance, some may find this addition, along with a specially created scent available for purchase, somewhat gimmicky. The exhibition also includes works by Monet's contemporaries, though this section feels somewhat unnecessary given that the show isn't a full retrospective.
Among the contemporary works, highlights include watercolors by J.M.W. Turner that are as immaterial as Monet's paintings but unmistakably Turner's style of coaxing life from color. Paul Signac's small, rippling watercolor "Venise" (1908) holds particular significance because Monet himself owned it. These additional works establish the broader fascination among artists with capturing Venice's atmosphere as "a ghost upon the sands of the sea," in John Ruskin's words, whose architectural drawings are also featured.
Art critic Clement Greenberg, in his 1957 essay "The Later Monet," suggested a line of influence from Monet to the Abstract Expressionists, typically centered on the water lilies. However, this exhibition makes a compelling case that the Venice works were actually the fountainhead of this influence. An image of San Giorgio Maggiore in the final room transforms its subject into a mirage emerging from an all-over field of pale, iridescent light, and enlarged sections of any of these paintings might easily resemble an Abstract Expressionist composition.
The true stars of the exhibition are two large water lily paintings displayed in a small, low-lit gallery. While these images have been reproduced and commodified extensively, experiencing them in person reveals their power as "liquid oxygen," weightlessly drowning the visual field in lily pad clouds of green, red, pink, and purple amid undulating blue. These works embody Monet's concept of instantaneity, never settling into a static scene, with each blossom and wave appearing to disappear before viewers can fully grasp it.
"Monet and Venice" succeeds as both a scholarly examination of a specific period and a crowd-pleasing exhibition featuring beloved masterpieces. The show demonstrates how Venice's unique environment of light and water provided Monet with the perfect laboratory for experiments that would culminate in his revolutionary water lily series, making this brief period far more significant than its duration might suggest.
