Monet in Venice (exhibit at Brooklyn Museum 2025)

 

Monet in Venice

(exhibit at Brooklyn Museum 2025)

 

Claude Monet was a cornerstone of the Impressionist movement, perhaps the most Romantic Painters of the late-19^th-early-20^th-centururies. They created new techniques to keep painting relevant in that context of emerging photography and to find new ways of representation to complete with the conventional illustrations of the abundant mass-market magazines.

 

Impressionism explored color in new ways, going many steps beyond Leonardo DaVinci’s rebellion against strong contours of centuries before, as they attempted to capture the essence of light on canvas. They were representational, but not satisfied with realistic similes of reflected light that create all our recognized images so, not surprisingly, Impressionist were drawn to water, where varying humidities radically alter the colors we perceived. They famously worked outdoors more than in their studios, trying to capture what a specific moment of a day had to offer in our concept of what the world was. Monet, himself, coined the term for this, using the French word for envelope, “enveloppe,” to describe the effects of the atmosphere meeting the water, the light glistening in the mist and humidity, which is now part of the world’s artistic glossary.

 

Lisa Small, one of the Curators of the show, “He [Monet] was a painter of light for sure—we all know that from Impressionism—but he was a painter of water throughout his entire career. We wanted to really show how Venice as a theme, a place where you’re surrounded by water and buildings are reflected in the water, ended up being the perfect Monet motif—an artist obsessed with reflections.”

 

Impressionism’s most obvious elements, visible brushstrokes and bright colors given a soft appearance, are now ingrained in our conception of painting, but were radical when the style first emerged in the 1860s. It was initially French and now seen as a reaction to rapid industrialization the cultural chauvinism of French Emperor Napoleon III. The style was treated with disdain at first, the term “Impressionism” was coined by Critic Louis Leroy as he mocked the movement and borrowed from the title of a Monet painting, “Impression, Sunrise” (1872). Though it soon grew to dominate the art world, some the disdain would last for generations, demonstrated by the Nazis declaring Impressionism “degenerate” long after it had become hugely popular.

 

Before his visit to Venice, Monet had devoted much of his efforts to his own garden in Giverny, France. He was captivated by the elusive nature of the Water Lily pond’s surface, always the same, always mutating. But he became dissatisfied with his capacity to capture this subject, and canceled a planned exhibit of the latest of this already beloved subject. After that, his wife convinced him to travel to Venice for a “restorative holiday.”

 

It was not a casually chosen destination; Artists had been in love with Venice for centuries and the Impressionists were especially drawn to the Italian city. It was already long-standing at that point, a remarkable and improbable achievement, created out of over a hundred islands made rich through shipping starting in the 12^th c. and built itself up in the 15^th c. through technological innovations and the greatest of all Renaissance Architecture. Key to Venice’s history is that its most famous landmarks constructed only shortly before the city’s economic decline.

 

By the end of the Renaissance, Venice had suffered a series of plagues and had been eclipsed by other ports, so what it had already become was what it would remain, among the most beautiful cities on earth, unique in in its network of canals that were often its city streets, and largely untouched by time as the centuries rolled on. It was seen as among the most romantic places on earth, and later attempts to capture that romantism elsewhere, by force of development instead of organic evolution, proved pale comparisons.

 

When the Frenchman Monet visited there in 1908 with his second wife Alice, he was 68-years-old. He initially reacted to the city as if it would deepen his artisitc rut, declaring it “too beautiful to be painted … unrenderable” and that he was “too old to paint such beautiful things.”

 

Curator Small again, “If you’re going to try your hand at something that other artists have been painting literally for 500 years ... it’s got to be a little bit daunting.”

 

In Monet’s day, Venice was nicknamed “La Serenissima” (“The Most Serene Republic”) and centuries of previous interpretations of it graced the walls of Monet’s favorite museums in Paris and London. Venice might have been suffering of too-much love, the ornate architecture and picturesque waterways now bordering on cliché, especially for those who couldn’t experience first-hand. Around the time of Monet’s visit, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti proclaimed, “We repudiate the old Venice … We want to cure and heal this putrefying city, this magnificent sore from the past.” But then, he was a Futurist, and they were often jerks.

 

 Small again, “Monet would have been quite well aware of the significance of Venetian scenery in painting. He keenly felt that burden of being in a place that already was so well known.”

 

But he got over his grumpiness, allowed himself to be seduced, an went into a creative fury. He embraced a rigorous discipline of visiting different sites throughout the day, painting each progressively day-after-day, producing a total of 37 canvases, some of the sites painted repeatedly to explore the way the light changed the architecture at different hours, something that had long been his habit. Like his “studio boat” in France, his often set up his easel on a gondola on the water to allow him to capture of the greatest experience of interplay of sky, water, and architecture, deliberately confusing where the building began and the wetness began.

 

These were first displayed in 1912, and one Critic observed, “that there is no subject, however hackneyed it may seem, that cannot be renewed and magnified by interpretation.”

 

Shortly before his leaving, a vacation he extended from a few weeks to two-and-a-half-months, he wrote, “I’m very sad that I’ll soon have to leave this unique light … What a shame I didn’t come here when I was a younger man, when I was full of daring! … Still … I have spent some delightful hours here, almost forgetting that I am now an old man.”

 

On his return to France, Monet wrote his friend, Durand-Ruel, “my trip to Venice has had the advantage of making me see my canvases with a better eye.”

 

This would prove to be Monet’s last international trip. He planned a return to Venice, but that evaporated in the wake of Alice’s death in 1911. He wrote is stepdaughter Germaine Hoschedé Monet, “I do not stop thinking about her while painting.”

 

In France, having finished the canvases started in Venice and putting them on display, he never again seriously addressed architectural subjects. His already beloved, still-evolving, Water Lillies, would dominate his output until his death in 1026 at age 86. These later Water Lillies fill an entire gallery at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan and, though representational, are still considered foundational to the emergence of Abstract Expressionism.

 

This exhibit includes 19 of the 37 Venice paintings, plus other works by Monet to create a context for the Venetian ones. There’s also prints of somewhat fanciful maps and city-scenes dating back to the Renaissance, when its bustle was less driven by tourism, and they seem like grand stage-sets for Opera. There’s also a large body of Artists who were Monet’s contemporaries, or at least nearly so, similarly enraptured by the city: Canaletto, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, John Ruskin, John Singer Sargent, Paul Signac, J. M. W. Turner, and James McNeill Whistler. These contributions were essential, and I was most impressed by Turner’s pictures, smallish, atmospheric, watercolors that rivaled Monet’s more ambitious canvases.

 

The works of other artists make up half-or-more of the 100 displayed work, so ultimately, the show is more about Venice than Monet himself. Still, it is the largest Monet exhibit in the NYC for the last twenty-five years. Among these beautiful paintings are two broadly acknowledged Monet masterpieces, the Brooklyn Museum’s own “Palazzo Ducale,” and “The Grand Canal, Venice” from the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco which is the Brooklyn Museum’s partner in this show.

 

Wrote Thomas P. Campbell of the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco (one of an array of Public and Private collections that leant works for the traveling exhibit), “Unlike bustling scenes painted by other artists, Monet’s Venice is hauntingly deserted, with its architecture, buildings, and canals dissolving in an atmospheric light. This exhibition offers an opportunity to experience Monet’s sublime vision of the famed Italian city, and for visitors to feel inspired by new perspectives on an artist they may think they know very well.”

 

And Campbell is right, Monet’s Venice is mostly people-less, but it is also roiling with motion. It’s the water and the light itself, especially in the many paintings of the Santa Maria della Salute (La Grand Canal” is one of these) from different vantage points and at different times of day. The best are ghostly, and misty ghosts are always in motion.

 

And Melissa E. Buron, one of the Curators of this exhibit, “His Venetian paintings are among the most luminous and poetic of his career, yet they are often overshadowed by his depictions of the French landscape, as well as by his late works that are linked to the rise of 20th-century abstraction. His time in Venice was a critical period of creative renewal that has not previously been explored in-depth before this exhibition.”

 

The show opens with video screens showing footage of modern-day Venice which, despite being assaulted by damaging flooding for at least the whole of my lifetime and is now probably the Western European city most at risk because of Global Warming, is still very much frozen in time even 100-plus years after Monet. It ends with large pictures on Coney Island’s now long-lost Luna Park, which tried to create a Venetian Fantasy for day-trippers to the remote part of Brooklyn, NYC.