Monet And Venice

In a significant traveling exhibition, many of Claude Monet’s radiant and evocative Venice paintings are to be reunited for the first time in over a century.

Monet’s Venice paintings are high points in his lifelong engagement with the interplay of water and light. Monet and Venice—anchored by two masterworks from the collections of Brooklyn and San Francisco, The Doge’s Palace and The Grand Canal, Venice—will be the first exhibition and English-language publication dedicated to this significant suite of paintings since their Parisian debut at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in 1912.

Monet keenly felt the burden of influence in a city that had so often been depicted and had long been an icon of waning, fragile beauty. Venice was—and is—a place where culture and nature are profoundly and uniquely entangled. Monet’s images of Venice’s buildings and canals dissolved in colorful mist and hazy light may be seen as meditations on human aesthetic interaction with a natural environment built upon for centuries.

These tonally unifying atmospheres—which he referred to as the enveloppe—reveal Monet’s essentially ecological understanding of the world in which he immersed himself. Air, light, water, and stone emerge together from a matrix of bold brushwork; buildings, reflections, and space are interconnected in luminous paintings that reinscribed and transformed the centuries-old Venetian landscape tradition. Including lush reproductions, newly commissioned texts, and maps of the artist’s views, this book is an essential addition to any Monet lover’s library.

About the Author :
Lisa Small is senior curator of European art at the Brooklyn Museum. Melissa Buron is director of collections and chief curator at the V&A, and previously served as director of curatorial affairs at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Review :
"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." — ART NEWS

"'I was interested in focusing on this chapter in his career because it was so discreet,” says Small, who co-curated “Monet and Venice” with Melissa Buron, director of collections and chief curator of the Victoria and Albert Museum. While some of the Venice paintings have appeared in other shows over the years, the Brooklyn Museum’s new exhibition is the first “that really takes that group of work as its focus, as the heart of the exhibition since 1912,” Small adds." — SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE

"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." — NATIONAL REVIEW

"Monet is well known for painting the same subject again and again, capturing different views of an otherwise identical scene based on the changing light at different times of the day and year. In Venice, he took a different approach, moving like clockwork throughout the day to return to different buildings on the same schedule.
In the end, Monet would exhibit paintings of nine motifs from across the Venetian landscape, canvases combining architecture, sky, and, predominantly, water in a mostly opalescent palette of blues, purples, pinks, and greens. The Palazzo Ducale and other landmarks seem to shimmer like a mirage above the glassy waters, their sparkling beauty at once fleeting and eternal." — ARTNET.COM

"In 1908, Claude Monet paid his first—and only—visit to Venice, at the encouragement of his wife Alice. At first, he was reluctant to leave his home in Giverny, but it didn’t take long for him to recognize and ultimately treasure Venice’s singular cityscape. It was there that Monet produced his last new works to ever be shown publicly during his lifetime, and it was there that he renewed his technical, thematic, and artistic skills." — MY MODERN MET