Flimsy Premise Aside, Monet and Venice Worth Seeing

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.

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Brian T. Allen

Brian T. Allen is National Review’s art critic.

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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.