Flimsy Premise Aside, Monet and Venice Is Worth Seeing

The Brooklyn Museum has assembled a gorgeous show, and, hey, it’s Venice.

I love the Brooklyn Museum, a perennial disaster but a quirky-to-crackpot, venerable, and, overall, endearing one. Its collection is first-rate and fascinating. Its home on Eastern Parkway near the Botanic Garden is, like the museum, a paradox. It’s a grand Beaux-Arts pile but welcoming and comfortable. The museum is chronically broke. Like the tree and many of the characters in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, that classic Brooklyn story, it survives against the odds not grudgingly but with grace and spunk. I visited a couple of weeks ago to see Monet and Venice, its new blockbuster exhibition concluding its 200th-birthday celebration. Monet (1840–1926) was among the pioneers in the radical Impressionism movement, an exquisite colorist and also shimmerist — a new word, I suspect — but it’s his version of modern abstraction, of which he was also a pioneer. New York hasn’t had a big Monet show in 25 years.

Monet’s Venice interlude is short. He visited once, in 1908, when he was 68, and painted close to 40 works, most very modest, over the next two or three years. Back in France, he returned, and fast, to his lily pond and garden in Giverny for subjects. He exhibited his Venice work in 1912 at Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris. A lot of it sold to Americans. That’s the last time a focused mass of Venice Monets has been together. It’s good to see Monet’s take on Venice, a unique, enchanting subject, and to think of it, as the exhibition does, in the context of Canaletto, Turner, Whistler, and Sargent, all players in Monet and Venice. In terms of quantity, they share the bill with Monet. Their Venice scenes are better than his, which is a big intellectual problem for Monet and Venice.

It’s a nice, uplifting way to end the museum’s bicentennial party and an acknowledgment, likely unintended, that it’s a schizophrenic institution. That’s not fatal and can be considered part of its charm. Last year’s Toward Joy show, the museum’s malevolent redo of its American collection, was “Road Runner” vroom, vroom woke as it raced through the Looking Glass. Its Solid Gold show, an art history of the color and the precious metal, was less a malignancy and more a bad case of indigestion. It was massive, entangled, redundant, and distended. No one died, though, or at least “a surfeit of gold lamé” hasn’t appeared on any known death certificates. It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby was curated by the Australian feminist lesbian comedian of that name. The art was great. Gadsby is about as big a hoot as Woody Allen playing an undertaker. Best to leave curating to curators; even better, leave it to curators who don’t exist in a New York bubble, but that might be an impossible dream. Believe me, Monet and Venice is an improvement.

The Brooklyn Museum also did the Elizabeth Catlett exhibition I reviewed when it was at the National Gallery. She was a black Marxist who lived for decades in Mexico. It was a huge survey that should have been a third the size, at most, to suit Catlett’s status as a good but neither intriguing nor seductive artist. Like many Brooklyn shows, it was race-obsessed, like its Nona Faustine exhibition earlier this year. She’s an obese black woman artist who does trite nude self-portraits. Also for its anniversary, Brooklyn did the fun show of Paul McCartney’s snapshots from 1963 and 1964 as the Beatles soared to fame.

A mixed bag indeed, but the museum sees itself and the borough as all about diversity, equity, inclusion, victims and oppressors, and endless reckonings and atonements, with the occasional crowd-pleaser since it’s always nearly belly-up. I’m happy it gave a slot to a dead white Frenchman and to Venice, a place of so much lore and timeless beauty.

Aside from attracting a crowd, which Monet and Venice will, and rightly so, the museum got good loans along with its partner, the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. The Legion of Honor, in Lincoln Park with a stupendous view of the Golden Gate Bridge, is part of San Francisco’s city- and county-run museum system. It owns The Grand Canal, Venice, from 1908. Brooklyn owns The Palazzo Ducale, also from 1908. They’re among the meatiest of Monet’s Venice views. Together, Brooklyn and the Legion of Honor pried Monets from public and private collections. Monet and Venice goes to San Francisco in early 2026.

The exhibition begins in what is now the Brooklyn Museum’s characteristic evocative style. It does multi-sensory and does it well. Entering the rotunda on the fifth floor, visitors see a specially made film showing wall-size views of Venice and hear a symphony by Niles Luther, the Brooklyn Museum’s composer-in-residence. Movements inspired by a Monet painting on view are played in selected galleries, evoking a Venice that seems to shimmer like a mirage and then dissolve. There’s an exhibition scent, too, suggesting salt air and water lilies. I wasn’t conscious of it in the galleries, but it’s for sale in the shop.

Monet and his wife, Alice (1844–1911), never particularly wanted to go to Venice. Monet loved painting outdoors and was certainly various, depicting city boulevards in Paris, peaceful towns, haystacks, cathedrals, seaside cliffs, and train stations. He was far from a stick-in-the-mud. As a much younger man, he’d painted close to a hundred views of London. When Mary Hunter, one of his American collectors, invited the couple to visit her in Venice, Monet resisted. “I will not go,” he told his wife, but Alice frankly told him that she was sick of water lilies. He was sick of water lilies as well and in the middle of a confidence crisis. His dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, had told him earlier in 1908 that he didn’t think the water-lily pictures on which Monet had been working were marketable.

Though rich and revered, Monet was shattered. He feared going to Venice, the home of Giorgione, Bellini, Titian, Veronese, Tiepolo, and so many others, and having nothing new to add. And, at 68, then a long life, he felt spent. Yet so many of his artist friends — Boudin, Manet, Renoir, Signac, Whistler, and Sargent among them — had visited and reveled in Venice as a subject. He agreed to go, reluctantly. Arriving there for what the Monets believed to be a short October stay during which he’d make a few dabbles, Monet was blunt: “Venice is too beautiful to be painted,” and “it’s unrenderable.”

After the gallery of sites, scent, and sounds, the next gallery plumbs the Venice that Monet encountered. There’s John Singer Sargent’s Interior in Venice, from 1899, showing a salon in the Palazzo Barbaro, which Hunter had rented in 1908 from its American owners. Photographs, among them a shot of the Monets feeding pigeons in St. Mark’s Square, and clips of silent films are on view. A dabble, The Red House, is there, too. It’s a quick laying down of forms and color he saw as a souvenir and never developed. The Monets absorbed the work of Tintoretto especially. Soon they were planning to extend their visit by weeks. Monet ordered fresh canvases from his Paris supplier.

Did Venice cast its spell? By the 1890s, Monet was enamored less with motifs than with the ephemeral, colored atmosphere that surrounded and transformed the motif, what he called its enveloppe. He focused on fleeting time as well, signaled especially by changes in light as the day passed. Venice is certainly a city of water, stone, air, and reflections fashioned by light. What did he paint? What was he thinking? What were the curators thinking?

There’s a lot of context in Monet and Venice, which means the curators scrambled and hedged to find a solid theme. The contextual component starts 200 years before the artist’s visit — a bad sign — with the Grand Tour undertaken usually by rich British young men for both pleasure — good weather, food, wine, and women they’d never marry — and a first-hand education in art, archaeology, and idiosyncratic European manners. Then they could go back and become gouty aristocrats. As early as 1700, Venice was an essential stop. The city’s place as a maritime power had faded, but it was still splendid and exotic, hadn’t been sacked by Napoleon and the Austrians, and could still put on a good show like the annual Carnival, ducal regattas, and masquerades.

Monet and Venice didn’t need to dive so far into the past. Monet wasn’t your typical tourist and wasn’t there for the weather, food, wine, and accommodating women. He was French. Been there, done that. It seems both a tangent and a filler. That said, I’m happy to see a spotlight on Michele Marieschi (1710–1743) and his Views of Venice, from 1741, all 22 etchings and engravings. Marieschi’s views were both art and souvenirs. He focused on top vistas and monuments sprinkled with fine detail, rippling water, lots of boats, workers, and well-heeled locals.

Marieschi, not famous today, was part of the circle of Canaletto, the most renowned and among the earliest painters of Venetian buildings, pageants, canals, and everyday life, all prizing miniaturist, sparkling detail. More significantly, Marieschi’s work inspired Piranesi to start his own series of etched views — of Rome. These are bigger, more dazzling, and combine everyday life with ancient, Renaissance, and Baroque architecture. Speaking of Canaletto (1697–1768), his Venice, the Grand Canal Looking East with Santa Maria della Salute, from around 1749, is in the exhibition. It’s not on point, either but belongs to the Legion of Honor, so why not include it?

A section on Monet as a painter of water follows. Fine. There’s lots of water in Venice. The water in the paintings on view, alas, is French, not Perrier, not Evian but water from the Seine and off the Normandy coast. Rising Tide at Pourville, from 1882, owned by the Brooklyn Museum, and Waves Breaking, from 1881, a Legion of Honor picture, are very beautiful but Monet and Venice is about Monet and Venice, and about 1908, not about nearly 30 years before. There are two sections called Enveloppes and Reflections — be consistent, it’s reflets in French — and they display a showstopper view of Parliament and the Thames from 1903, Waterloo Bridge: Effects of Sunlight in the Fog, a gorgeous picture that the National Museum of Canada bought in 1914, when Canadians might have been a tad smarter, and The Japanese Footbridge, a mediocre Giverny picture from 1895. Again, no Venice.

Vista and Vignettes, another expansive section, has Sargent, Whistler, Turner, Renoir, Signac, and Thomas Moran and Robert Blum, both American and good at Venice scenes. The art is stellar, and these artists created their own Venice. Brooklyn owns nearly 40 Sargent watercolors, nearly all purchased from Sargent’s debut New York gallery show in 1909. They’re not often on view, so it was a huge treat to see four of them as well as two or three that the museum borrowed. They’re gorgeous. Sargent loved Venice for its exotic and touristical canal views, but mostly its narrow alleys and, I suspect, its fetching gondoliers. After, say, 1900, he moved away from portraits of rich people and toward scenes of everyday life. In Venice he found plenty. Whistler’s Venice etchings are fabulous.

When we finally get back to Monet’s Venice, at the end, with pretty, gauzy views of San Giorgio Maggiore, the Doge’s Palace, the Palazzo Contarini, and Santa Maria della Salute, Luther’s music swells, and I wonder where are the sweet-and-sour sardines? Venice is better known for surf than turf, but where’s the beef? Even the exhibition and its catalogue are agnostic. It’s not that the Monets are bad. They’re pretty. They’re also obvious.

The exhibition has three problems, or I’d call them challenges. First, the Canalettos, Sargents, and Whistlers in Monet and Venice are better works of art than nearly all of Monet’s Venice work. So are nearly all the earlier Monets of French scenes and the two London Monets on view. Second, and there’s nothing very wrong about this, Monet’s Venice trip was less a revelation than a much-needed vacation for a down-in-the-dumps artist who needed a tiramisu. Monet came back refreshed. The sea air was good for him. It cures many ills. He needed some new scenery. Monet’s later water-lily panoramas owe something to his time in Venice, which is, after all, one panorama after another. It was probably therapeutic for Monet to paint architecture, too, especially rigorously geometric Italian architecture. Too many random water lilies in the mist degrade focus. These are good enough points, but I don’t think, in themselves, they support an exhibition.

The third problem surrounds Alice. Alice died of leukemia in 1911. Poor Alice. Much is made of this in the exhibition and catalogue, which is fine. What’s strange is how prominently Alice figures in Monet and Venice. Her story shares the introductory wall text with Monet’s story, and, especially in the book, she’s a constant presence. She wasn’t his muse as, say, Picasso’s women were his. It seems that in the absence of a solid art history story, the curators hyped a personal-interest story.

All of this said, Monet and Venice is a high point in New York’s fall season, not for coherence but for the quality of art — not always Monet’s — and the captivating arrangement. There’s so much to enjoy at the Brooklyn Museum. Its Egyptian art, Judy Chicago’s Dinner Table, and Giovanni della Robbia’s terra-cotta Resurrection of Christ are among its countless treasures. Even its heinous American-art redo has many high moments. Just ignore the interpretation, the gimmicks, and the trash. The museum is a national treasure.