MONET & 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.

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.