Monet and Venice at the Brooklyn Museum is the kind of blockbuster exhibition that has everything going for it. Its focus on a brief, lesser-known period in Monet’s career — a three-month stint in Venice in 1908 that produced 37 paintings — gives it a scholarly edge, while fan favorites by the OG Impressionist, including two towering water lily works, all but guarantee big crowds. The curators, Lisa Small and Melissa Buron, do a strong job of historically contextualizing the art and bringing Monet and his wife, Alice Hoschedé, into view as people.
But, for all the wall texts and archival materials — plus a show within the show of Venice-themed works by others — nothing justifies celebrating this sliver of his oeuvre more than the paintings themselves.
The exhibition includes several works from different periods, 19 of them from Venice, framing his trip as a transitional moment that paved the way for his famed water lilies. What’s clear is that the city — which Monet visited only once and reluctantly, at Alice’s urging — turned out to be the ideal environment to explore the relationship between water and light that long preoccupied him.
Claude Monet, “Rising Tide at Pourville” (1882), oil on canvas
Claude Monet, “Sailboats on the Seine at Petit-Gennevilliers” (1874), oil on canvas
Early paintings of seaside scenes show Monet rendering water as a mutable but viscerally material element. In “Rising Tide at Pourville” (1882), in which a brilliant green cliff with a small cottage overlooks a churning sea, waves appear as thick, vigorous brushstrokes. Rows of white froth are almost palpable as they collide with the land. Nearby, the tranquil “Sailboats on the Seine at Petit Gennevilliers” (1874) portrays boats floating on a slick surface that looks almost gelatinous. A strip of land spanning the canvas is bisected vertically on the left side by a series of green-blue forms: a tree and its reflection, and a wedge of cerulean at the bottom. The boats form a diagonal starting at the intersection of the horizontal and vertical lines. The effect works to cohere the composition, to make its world of liquid, solid, and vapor into a tableau, as if we’re seeing it through a window.
In contrast, the physicality of Venice seems to dissipate into water and air. The wall texts note that Monet was intrigued by water’s ability to change states. In works such as “The Rio della Salute” (1908), he intermingles these states. The painting’s picture plane is taken up mostly by the luminous orange-red buildings that line a minor canal, but about halfway down, the architecture disintegrates into a whirlwind of brushstrokes mirroring the looseness of the water, while the water on the other side of the canvas appears to rise up and evaporate into the air. The entire scene lingers at the cusp of coming together and apart.
Claude Monet, “The Rio della Salute” (1908), oil on canvas
The exhibition culminates with 10 Venice paintings, all different iterations of the same few views, displayed in the round (as his water lilies are in Paris’s Musée de l’Orangerie). A painting of the Grand Canal in this room, dominated by light blue oils that texturally evoke oil pastel, immerses viewers in the hazy waterway. On the right, 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 on the left — most prominently one in the foreground that divides the canvas — dissolve the wood into gleaming specks of green and white.
The final room also greets viewers with music by composer-in-residence Niles Luther that sounds a little like the Mahler refrain in Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film Death in Venice. It’s a nice score, but the addition feels a little gimmicky, as does a scent created for the show and available to buy.
Claude Monet, “The Grand Canal, Venice” (1908), oil on canvas
Claude Monet, “San Giorgio Maggiore” (1908), oil on canvas
Another debatable decision is the display of artworks by Monet’s contemporaries. Since Monet and Venice isn’t a full retrospective, this section does some embellishing that’s not really needed. Yet it establishes the fascination among artists with capturing the city’s atmosphere as “a ghost upon the sands of the sea,” in John Ruskin’s words (quoted next to two of his architectural drawings on view). Among the highlights here are watercolors by J.M.W. Turner, as immaterial as Monet’s paintings, but unmistakably his style of coaxing inchoate life from color. Paul Signac’s small, rippling watercolor titled “Venise” (1908) is notable, too, most of all because Monet owned it.
In his essay “The Later Monet” (1957), art critic Clement Greenberg posited a line of influence from Monet to the Abstract Expressionists. The now familiar association centers on the former’s water lilies, but Monet and Venice could make the case that the Venice works were the fountainhead. An image of San Giorgio Maggiore in the final room goes even further than the others to transform its subject into a mirage emerging from an all-over field of pale, iridescent light. And an enlarged section of any of the paintings might resemble an AbEx composition.
Still, the show’s real stars are the two large water lily paintings in a small, low-lit gallery. We’ve all seen them reproduced and commodified to death, but in person, these images are like liquid oxygen, weightlessly drowning the visual field in lily pad clouds of green, red, pink, and purple amid the undulating blue. They embody Monet’s concept of “instantaneity,” never settling into a scene, each blossom and wave gone before we can grasp it.
Claude Monet, “Water Lilies” (1914–17), oil on canvas
Claude Monet, “Waves Breaking” (1881), oil on canvas
Detail of “Waves Breaking”
Installation view of the final room in Monet and Venice at the Brooklyn Museum (photo Paula Abreu Pita)
Claude Monet, “The Red House” (1908), oil on canvas
Claude Monet, “The Palazzo Ducale” (1908), oil on canvas
Claude Monet, “Japanese Footbridge, Giverny” (1895), oil on canvas
Claude Monet, “Le Palais da Mula” (1908), oil on canvas
Paul Signac, “Venise” (1908), watercolor on paper
Ephemera in Monet and Venice at the Brooklyn Museum, including a photograph of Claude Monet and Alice Hoschedé with pigeons in Venice by an unknown photographer, 1908.
Claude Monet, “Water Lilies” (1914–17), oil on canvas
Monet and Venice continues at the Brooklyn Museum (200 Eastern Parkway, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn) through February 1, 2026. The exhibition was curated by Lisa Small and Melissa Buron.
