Monet & Venice
Brooklyn Museum, New York
October 11, 2025–February 1, 2026
All eyes are on the Brooklyn Museum, where Monet’s long-awaited return isn’t just another museum event; it’s a cultural wake-up call. Monet and Venice, the first major exhibition in over a century dedicated to Claude Monet’s Venetian cityscapes, floods the Brooklyn Museum with luminous visions of water and air. Bringing together more than a hundred artworks, rare books, and archival treasures, it marks the most ambitious Monet exhibition New York has seen in over twenty-five years and perhaps the most transporting.
Walking into the Brooklyn Museum’s “Monet & Venice,” I am first met by an immersive digital installation that instantly dissolves the boundary between the gallery and the lagoon city itself. Venetian waters ripple across the walls in liquid color, accompanied by an ethereal soundscape that feels like light translated into music. For a moment, I forget I’m in New York. Sitting before the projection, I watch Venice unfold like a film, its domes and canals shimmering with the same dreamlike impermanence Monet must have seen more than a century ago.
As I move through the exhibition, the scale and ambition of this show become clear. With over a hundred works, including nineteen of Monet’s Venetian paintings, it is both a reunion and a revelation. The curators, Lisa Small and Melissa Buron, have assembled a sequence that feels cinematic in pacing yet deeply scholarly in intention. Here, Monet’s Venice is not the postcard-perfect destination of Canaletto or Turner but an interior vision, a meditation on color, reflection, and transience. His Palazzo Ducale, glowing with prismatic brushstrokes, hovers between solidity and vapor. San Giorgio Maggiore emerges from its own reflection, almost dematerialized in its brilliance. Each canvas seems less painted than breathed into existence.
What strikes me most is how the exhibition allows Monet’s Venetian works to converse with his lifelong fascination with water from the Seine and the Thames to the water lilies of Giverny. The curators draw subtle yet powerful parallels between these late Venetian canvases and the more familiar garden scenes. Both are laboratories of perception, spaces where the artist’s obsession with fleeting light becomes almost spiritual. The inclusion of historical ephemera, Alice Monet’s postcards, early guidebooks, and rare photographs adds intimacy, reminding us that these masterpieces were once simply travel souvenirs of a husband and wife who found renewal in beauty.
The accompanying symphonic composition by Niles Luther elevates the experience into something beyond visual. His score, inspired by Monet’s palette and Venetian acoustics, seems to echo the rhythm of brushstrokes and an audible shimmer that deepens the dialogue between sound and sight. By the final gallery, where the music and the paintings converge, the effect is transcendent. Monet’s Venice dissolves before me, leaving only color, air, and emotion. Some of Monet’s later Water Lilies shimmer elsewhere in the museum as pure showstoppers. One from around 1914–17, on loan from the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, where Monet and Venice travels next year, feels like abstraction before abstraction. The lilies dissolve into restless swirls of pink and red; the pads glow in translucent greens, as if light itself were slipping through. It’s the same visual spell as The Rio della Salute, only looser, bolder, more transcendent. A century later, these works still hum with quiet, hypnotic power.