New York’s Biggest Monet Show in 25 Years Is a Revelation

In 1908, Claude Monet, the Impressionist painter who revolutionized French art history just three decades earlier, was at a creative impasse. He couldn’t stop futzing over his latest “Water Lilies” paintings, and his dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, knew the latest entries in the series were a problem. Realizing that these new paintings simply didn’t work, Monet delayed an exhibition of them at Durand-Ruel’s Paris gallery several times before finally pulling the plug on the show, along with the “Water Lilies” series altogether.

One year later, Monet was in much better spirits. Refreshed and reinvigorated, he made an unexpected return to the “Water Lilies,” which he approached with aplomb. Well into his 60s, Monet was in the midst of a late-career renaissance.

What changed? An elegant Brooklyn Museum exhibition provides the answer: a sojourn in Venice that allowed Monet to “see my canvases with a better eye,” as he once put it in a letter to Durand-Ruel. His three-month trip to the water-logged Italian city resulted in 37 remarkable paintings, more than half of which are now assembled for this New York show, opening October 11.

Conjure a Monet painting in your head, and you probably imagine his transcendent images of a Gothic cathedral in Rouen, his lush pictures of haystacks in the French countryside, or his beautiful landscapes of Le Havre. Perhaps you even think of his majestic paintings of British Parliament, seen in shadowy profile amid a haze. What you probably don’t think of are these Venice works, though the Brooklyn Museum show ought to change that.

The 100-work survey centers almost exclusively around this series, which curators Lisa Small and Melissa Buron have paired with others’ art about Venice, including vedute cityscapes by Canaletto and paintings of La Serenissima’s canals by J. M. W. Turner. Such a premise has the potential to be a fussy one: it’s a relatively small slice of Monet’s vast oeuvre, and one that’s lesser-known. Plus, no New York museum has endeavored to stage a Monet show this big in more than 25 years. One would be justified in desiring a full-dress retrospective over a focused show.

But “Monet and Venice,” as this exhibition is called, is nothing short of a revelation. If Monet never painted these Venice works, the exhibition persuasively suggests, he never would’ve reached his full creative potential. To put it another way, without the Venice series, you don’t get some of the finest works he ever made, including the “Water Lilies” paintings that fill an entire gallery at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.

The show is an unusually serious one for the Brooklyn Museum, which has recently taken a lashing for exhibitions that make critics cringe, even as they draw crowds. “Monet and Venice” is not immune from a distinctly Brooklyn Museum form of pandering. Before presenting any art, there’s an “introductory multisensory space”—as the wall text calls it—that features video of gondolas and the Palazzo Ducale, along with lighting intended to resemble sunlight bouncing off canal water and a scent designed specifically for the show. (That tacky aroma, which mercifully does not smell like an actual Venetian grotto, is available for sale in a gift shop nearby.) My advice: breeze through this embarrassing “multisensory space,” and head straight for the galleries, where there’s some sturdy scholarship on view.

“Monet and Venice” begins with Monet nearly not going to Venice, which he viewed as an artistic cliché. The reaction is understandable: the floating enclave lured plenty of artists, including the British polymath John Ruskin, who, in one 1850–52 watercolor featured here, depicts the Palazzo Ducale’s many columns—without any of the gas lanterns that had been installed by this time. The piece exemplifies the treacly approach taken by many of Monet’s contemporaries, who depicted the city not as the tourist trap it had already become but as the lustrous symbol of the past they wanted it to be.

Even if Monet didn’t know the Ruskin watercolor—and it’s unclear whether he did, according to this show—Monet probably had other works like it in mind when he said that Venice was “too beautiful to be painted,” expressing what sounds like a mixture of sincerity and sarcasm. But beauty is hard to resist, and so too, apparently, are the demands of a spouse. Monet’s wife, Alice Hoschedé, repeatedly called for a voyage to Venice, and the Impressionist was gradually worn down. The couple holed up in the Palazzo Barbaro at the invitation of Mary Hunter, a baroness whose portrait by John Singer Sargent is currently on view in this show.

Monet painted outdoors in Venice, continuing the plein air tradition that made Impressionism so transgressive during the 1870s and ’80s, when working indoors was still the Salon-approved norm. But in Italy, he maintained a new—and exceedingly rigorous—work schedule. Rather than returning to a given subject at different times of day, as he had so memorably done for Rouen’s cathedral and his haystacks, he painted his Venetian subjects during the same two-hour span he allotted daily from his schedule. This brought his work in a new direction, for no longer was he representing the passage of time. Instead, he was opting instead to a form of transformation less easily described.

Take his paintings of the Palazzo Ducale as seen from the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, across the Grand Canal. The Brooklyn Museum includes a few of them grouped together, and though they are superficially similar, close looking reveals that they are different, albeit ever so slightly. Note how an embankment in the lower part of the paintings shifts in color, appearing bluish grey in one work and bruised purple in another. The palace itself goes in and out of focus, and the chop of the canal variously denatures into white strokes and fuses back together into a pastel-colored blur. What we’re seeing is change wrought by meteorological shifts: what Monet committed to canvas depended on how the weather altered the day’s sunlight.

The Brooklyn Museum exhibition usefully shows that Monet was consciously working against the grain. Whereas widely circulated photographs showed a static, peaceful Venice, Monet’s version of the city is roiled and full of motion. (One wonders, however, whether Monet didn’t fall for some artistic clichés himself: his canals are largely devoid of all that vessels that cross them.) And whereas paintings by Canaletto were so detailed as to appear photographic, Monet’s are smudgy and deliberately vague.

That style wasn’t exactly new for Monet, who demonstrated a predilection for unruly brushwork in paintings as early as 1872 with his famed Impression, Sunrise, in which just a few flecks of pine-green paint and a greyish wash signify the waters of Le Havre’s port. But the Venice paintings moved Monet’s practice even closer to abstraction. The Rio della Salute (1908), one of the canvases in the Brooklyn Museum show, even confuses the boundary between the purple walls of a palazzo and the water below, turning the whole thing into a tangle of messy paint strokes. No longer is it possible to tell where the building depicted ends and the natural environment around it begins.

Paintings like this one are parceled out across the Brooklyn Museum show amid Monet works from the years preceding them, but the exhibition’s grand finale is a room devoted purely to the Venice series. Set in a blue-carpeted area with a newly commissioned score by Niles Luther blasting, this gallery strikes a false note, because Monet’s grand achievement with these works was not necessarily the paintings themselves but the pieces that came after them.

Some of those later works, from his “Water Lilies” series, are featured in other galleries, and they are stunners. One from around 1914–17—on loan from the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, where “Monet and Venice” is headed next year—has lilies that are rendered mainly as swirls of unevenly mixed pink and red paint. The pads are delineated as loops of lime green; they appear semi-translucent, offering a view of the pond beneath. An egg-colored cloud can be seen up top, appearing to exist both above and below the water simultaneously. This is the same elision of time and space that can be seen in works like The Rio della Salute, except that here, Monet ventures even farther from legible figuration than before. Critics loved these new “Water Lilies,” and they continue to shine today.

When Monet was in Venice, Hoschedé, his wife, wrote that the city “has got hold of him and won’t let go.” How unfortunate, then, that she died in 1911, before she could be proven right.