Claude Monet, The Doge’s Palace, 1908. Brooklyn Museum

Monet and Venice

The Brooklyn Museum

October 11, 2025 – February 1, 2026

Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, March 21, 2026- July 26, 2026

“One could say, in fact, that Monet attempted to eliminate time as a variable to better concentrate on the interrelationships between atmosphere, light, color — and of course, how the water refracted these elements.”

Joachim. Pissarro, Monet and the Mediterranean

Monet is an excellent subject for an art exhibition, for he is an important, reliably stimulating painter. And also, of course, so is Venice, the home of Giorgione, Titian and all of their illustrious successors. For that reason, it too it is the subject of many exhibitions. But Monet and Venice is a slightly problematic theme. After all, Claude Monet only visited and worked in Venice once, relatively late in his career, in 1908, for just over two months, when he as 68. And so you could curate a major Monet show without including any of his Venetian paintings. By that point, his influential late aesthetic was well established, and it’s not apparent that he was open to further development. In Venice he did make 37 paintings in all, 29 of which are in this show, which is the first exhibition of these works gathered together.

We can view Monet and Venice as his version of such exhibitions as Canaletto and Venice, Guardi and Venice or Turner and Venice, reconstructions of a famous artist’s visual responses to this much-depicted city. Like his predecessors, Monet offers a striking view of Venice. No doubt, of course, one practical concern was also relevant to the curators here: Both Brooklyn and the San Francisco museum, which is the second site for this exhibition, own major Venetian scenes by Monet. But as I said, the problem........

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