From Oct. 11, 2025 to Feb. 1, 2026, the Brooklyn Museum in New York is hosting Monet and Venice, an exhibition that brings together a selection of Claude Monet’s Venetian paintings, an as yet under-researched chapter of the artist’s output. This is the largest museum exhibition devoted to Monet in New York in the past twenty-five years, featuring more than one hundred works of art, books and objects, including nineteen of the painter’s Venetian paintings.
The exhibition marks the first museum survey devoted to Monet’s Venetian works since their Parisian presentation in 1912, and places them in dialogue with works from key moments in his career and views of Venice by Canaletto, John Singer Sargent, J. M. W. Turner, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. The exhibition follows previous exhibitions the Brooklyn Museum has devoted to the Impressionist master, such as Monet’s London: Artists’ Reflections on the Thames, 1859-1914 (2005), Monet and the Mediterranean (1997) and Monet & His Contemporaries (1991).
Produced in collaboration with the Fine Arts Museum in San Francisco and curated by Lisa Small, Senior Curator of European Art at the Brooklyn Museum, and Melissa Buron, former Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Fine Arts Museum in San Francisco and now Director of Collections and Chief Curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the exhibition offers the public an opportunity to discover the poetic and innovative vision with which Monet interpreted the lagoon city.
In 1908, encouraged by his wife Alice, Monet left Giverny to travel to Venice. He was immediately enraptured by the city’s radiant light and architectural splendor. The works born of that sojourn, often overshadowed by his more celebrated French landscapes, constitute one of the most luminous and least explored chapters of his career. Plans for a return to Venice were interrupted in 1911 by the illness and subsequent death of Alice. Grieving, Monet retired to his studio, where he completed the Venetian paintings, which were exhibited with great success in Paris in 1912. Although Monet visited Venice only once, the city marked him deeply. With its fragile beauty and balance of land and water, it became a place of formal experimentation and symbolic resonance.
On display are works by artists who preceded or were contemporaries of Monet-including Renoir, Sargent, Turner and Whistler-that allow his vision to be placed within the long iconographic tradition of La Serenissima. Also featured are significant works from the Brooklyn Museum’s collections, including four watercolors by Sargent acquired in 1909 and a selection of Venetian etchings by Whistler.
Unlike Canaletto’s vivid scenes, Monet’s Venice appears almost devoid of human figures: the artist focuses his attention on the fusion of architecture, water and light, elements that dissolve into an enveloping atmosphere.
In addition to the paintings dedicated to Venice, the exhibition features more than a dozen works that illustrate Monet’s abiding fascination with water and reflections: from landscapes of Normandy to views of London to the famous water lilies of Giverny. Three of these canvases, from the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, a private collection and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, offer a direct comparison of Monet’s Venetian experiments with the evolution of his pictorial language. The exhibition also includes historical memorabilia, such as guides to Venice, postcards and letters written by Alice to her daughter, on loan from the private collection of Philippe Piguet, Alice Monet’s great-grandson from her first marriage.
Monet and Venice also offers the public a multi-sensory experience: an original symphonic score inspired by the artist’s Venetian paintings, composed by Niles Luther, composer-in-residence at the Brooklyn Museum. Then, in the museum’s fifth-floor rotunda, visitors will be greeted by an immersive installation curated by Brooklyn-based design studio Potion, featuring footage from Joan Porcel Studio and an ethereal soundscape by Luther, integrating environmental recordings made in Venice and and fragments of melodic themes from his symphony. In the concluding gallery, Luther’s symphony dialogues with Monet’s paintings of Venice - Palazzo Dario, San Giorgio Maggiore and the Doge’s Palace - in a synaesthetic experience that translates into sound the fading of light and color typical of the painting of the father of Impressionism.
Accompanying the exhibition is an illustrated catalog with an introduction by Melissa Buron and essays by Lisa Small, Niles Luther and scholars of Impressionism and nineteenth-century art, including André Dombrowski, Donato Esposito, Elena Marchetti, Félicie Faizand de Maupeou, Jonathan Ribner and Richard Thomson. The contributions aim to offer a critical reading of Monet’s Venetian works with a socio-historical and ecocritical perspective to understand one of the most intense moments of his career.
The exhibition is sponsored by Bank of America.
"It is exciting to bring together so many of Monet’s radiant paintings dedicated to Venice, including Brooklyn’s Doge’s Palace, acquired in 1920 and emblematic of the Museum’s pioneering commitment to modern French art," said Lisa Small. “Monet found the lagoon city the ideal setting to capture the evanescent, interconnected effects of colored light and air that define his style. In his Venetian paintings, magnificent churches and mysterious palaces, all evoked by prismatic touches of paint, dissolve into the shimmering atmosphere like floating apparitions. We look forward to our visitors ”traveling“ to Venice and immersing themselves in the unfolding beauty of these dazzling paintings.”
“We are delighted to present this innovative exhibition, which offers visitors a new opportunity to interact with one of the world’s most celebrated artists in a bold new way,” said Anne Pasternak, Shelby White and Leon Levy Director at the Brooklyn Museum. “Through thoughtful interpretation and design, we invite our audiences to see Venice through Monet’s eyes and be inspired by his vision.”
“In composing for this exhibition, I treated the paintings as souvenirs ìjust as Monet described them: memories imbued with beauty and melancholy,” Luther said. “My process is one of discovery, not invention: I discover music that no one has heard yet. Fusing Italian, French and American traditions, the composition reflects Monet’s shimmering, dissolved Venice, transforming brushstrokes into a living sound that envelops the listener in light and longing.”
Image: Claude Monet, Ducal Palace (1908; oil on canvas; Brooklyn Museum, gift of A. Augustus Healy, 20,634). Photo: Brooklyn Museum
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| New York, at Brooklyn Museum an exhibition dedicated to Claude Monet's Venetian paintings |
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