Biggest Monet exhibition in New York in 25 years is a revelation

In 1908, Claude Monet, the Impressionist painter who had revolutionized the history of French art thirty years earlier, reached a creative impasse. He couldn’t stop working on his latest “Water Lilies” painting, and his agent, Paul Durand-Ruel, knew the latest work in the series was a problem. Realizing that these new paintings were simply not going to work, Monet repeatedly postponed his exhibition at the Paris gallery Durand-Ruel and finally terminated it, along with the “Water Lilies” series.

A year later, Monet was in much better spirits. Refreshed and energized, he unexpectedly returned to “Water Lilies” and approached it with aplomb. Monet was in his 60s and in the midst of a late-career renaissance.

What has changed? An elegant exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum provides the answer: A brief stay in Venice allowed Monet to “see my canvases in a better light,” as he put it in a letter to Durand-Ruel. During his three-month journey through the flooded Italian city, he created 37 extraordinary paintings, more than half of which are now on display in a New York exhibition that opened on October 11.

Picture a Monet painting in your mind’s eye, and you might picture his larger-than-life image of Rouen’s Gothic cathedral, his lush pictures of haystacks in the French countryside, or his beautiful landscapes of Le Havre. Perhaps you even think of his majestic painting of the British Parliament, blurred in outline in the mist. What you might not expect are these Venetian works, although the Brooklyn Museum’s exhibition should change that.

This 100-work survey centers almost entirely on this series, which curators Lisa Small and Melissa Buron paired with other works of art about Venice, including Vedut Canaletto’s cityscape and JMW Turner’s La Serenissima canal painting. Such a premise might prove to be a nit-picky one: it is a relatively small part of Monet’s vast oeuvre, and little is known about it. Furthermore, a New York museum has not attempted an exhibition of Monet’s work on this scale in 25 years. There is reason to long for a lavish retrospective rather than a concentrated exhibition.

But the exhibition, called “Monet and Venice,” was certainly a revelation. The exhibition convincingly demonstrates that if Monet had never painted these Venetian works, he would never have reached his full creative potential. In other words, you can’t see some of his finest work ever without the Venice series, including the Water Lilies painting that takes up an entire gallery at Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art.

The exhibition is an unusually serious one for the Brooklyn Museum, which has come under fire recently for exhibitions that have attracted audiences but made critics cringe. “Monet and Venice” is not immune to the Brooklyn Museum’s overt pandering. Before any of the art is displayed, there’s an “introductory multi-sensory space” – as the wall text calls it – which contains videos of gondolas and the Ducal Palace, as well as lights that simulate sunlight reflecting off the water of the canal, and scents designed specifically for the exhibition. (That cheesy aroma, which thankfully doesn’t smell like a real Venetian grotto, is on sale at a nearby gift shop.) My advice: breeze through this embarrassing “multisensory space” and head straight to the gallery, which houses some solid academic work.

“Monet and Venice” almost begins with Monet no Going to Venice, he thought it was an artistic cliché. The reaction was understandable: the floating enclave attracted many artists, including the British polymath John Ruskin, who depicted many of the columns of the Ducal Palace in an 1850-52 watercolor before any gas lights were installed. The work exemplifies the sweet approach taken by many of Monet’s contemporaries, who painted the city as a glorious symbol of what they hoped it would be rather than the tourist trap it had become.

Even if Monet didn’t know about Ruskin watercolors—and based on this exhibition, it’s unclear whether he did—when Monet said Venice was “too beautiful to paint,” he may have had other similar works in mind, expressing what sounds like a mixture of sincerity and irony. But beauty is irresistible and, apparently, so are the demands of a spouse. Monet’s wife Alice Hoschede repeatedly called for a voyage to Venice, and the Impressionists were gradually exhausted. At the invitation of Baroness Mary Hunt, the couple took refuge in Palazzo Barbaro. (A painting by John Singer Sargent depicts the palace’s owners, Daniel and Ariana Curtis.)

Monet painted outdoors in Venice, continued outdoor This tradition was what made Impressionism so outlawed in the 1870s and 1880s, when interior work was still the accepted norm in salons. But in Italy he kept a new and extremely strict work schedule. Rather than returning to a particular subject at different times of the day, as he had done for Rouen Cathedral and the Haystacks, he painted Venetian subjects during the two hours he had allotted from his schedule each day. This gave his work a new direction, as he no longer represented the passage of time. Instead, he opted for a less easy-to-describe form of transformation.

Take, for example, his painting of the Palazzo Ducale as seen from the island of San Giorgio Maggiore across the Grand Canal. The Brooklyn Museum has grouped together some of these collections, and while they are superficially similar, a closer look reveals that they are different, albeit small ones. Note how the dike in the lower part of the painting changes color, appearing blue-gray in one work and bruised purple in another. The palace itself fades in and out, and sections of the canal morph in different ways into white strokes before remerging into soft colorful blurs. What we see are changes caused by meteorological changes: Monet’s appearance on the canvas depends on how the weather changes the day’s sunlight.

The Brooklyn Museum exhibition effectively demonstrates Monet’s conscious rejection of convention. While widely circulated photographs show a static, peaceful Venice, Monet’s version of the city is noisy and dynamic. (One wonders, however, whether Monet himself didn’t fall into some artistic cliché: his canals were essentially devoid of any ships that passed through them.) Where Canaletto’s paintings are so detailed they look photographic, Monet’s are smudged and intentionally blurry.

This style was nothing new for Monet, who showed a preference for irregular brushstrokes in his famous paintings as early as 1872. impression, sunrisein which only a few splotches of pine green paint and a light gray wash represent the waters of Le Havre harbor. But the paintings in Venice brought Monet’s practice closer to abstraction. this Tribute to Rio de Janeiro (1908), one of the canvases on display at the Brooklyn Museum, even blurs the line between the palace’s purple walls and the water below, turning the whole thing into a messy mess of brushstrokes. We can no longer tell where the depicted building ends and the nature surrounding it begins.

Paintings like this are spread across the Brooklyn Museum’s exhibition, shown alongside Monet’s work from previous years, but the show’s grand finale is a room devoted to the Venetian series. The gallery is housed in a blue-carpeted area with a newly commissioned blasting score by Niles Luther, but it gives the wrong impression because Monet’s great achievement in these works was not necessarily the paintings themselves, but the works that followed them.

Some of his later works, from his “Water Lilies” series, are shown in other galleries and they are stunning. One of the paintings, from around 1914-17, is on loan from the Museum of Fine Arts in San Francisco, where next year’s “Monet and Venice” exhibition will be held. The lilies in the painting appear primarily as swirls of unevenly mixed pink and red paint. The pads are depicted as lime green rings; they are translucent, allowing views of the pond below. Egg-colored clouds can be seen at the top, appearing to exist both above and below the water’s surface. This is the same elision of time and space that can be seen in works such as Tribute to Rio de Janeiroonly here, Monet is further away from a clear image than before. Critics loved these new “water lilies” and they still shine brightly today.

While Monet was in Venice, his wife Horsted wrote that the city “had a hold on him and would not let go.” How unfortunate, then, that she died in 1911 before her views could be proven correct.

Correction, 10/10/25 at 2:20 pm: A previous version of this article incorrectly described details of a John Singer Sargent painting in a Monet exhibition. It depicts Mr. and Mrs. Curtis, not Mary Hunt.