text by Perry Shimon
“It’s too beautiful to be painted,” Monet is said to have remarked, in a prominently placed quotation opening the thoughtfully conceived exhibition at the de Young Museum, co-organized with the Brooklyn Museum, on Monet’s late visit to Venice. The period under review was a challenging time in the artist’s development, a moment of intense frustration with his water lilies, and an encounter with a city so beautiful—and so beautifully rendered—that he felt overcome. We are told that the subsequent late lilies painted back home in his Giverny garden—some exceptional examples of which are on display in the exhibition—were largely a result of this Venetian journey.
One of the more interesting, if not entirely surprising, curatorial gambits of the exhibition suggests the extent to which much of Monet’s output resulted from pressure exerted by his dealers to produce for the market. This detail makes the rather uninspired and repetitive suite of Venetian paintings appear something of a capitulation to those imperatives. That Monet was captivated by Venice seems clear, though the works on view betray an ambivalent practice distinctly disenchanted by market pressures and anxiety before tradition.
San Biagio, James McNeill Whistler
Santa Maria della Salute, John Singer Sargent
The Piazzetta, Palazzo Ducale (Doge's Palace), J.M.W. Turner from 1840
The show contextualizes Monet’s engagement within a lively milieu of contemporaries, each endeavoring to make a mark on the flowing city. Whistler produced a series of fine etchings depicting working-class Venetians in the shadowy crevices of the city; Sargent offered a shimmering eruption of watercolor scenes rendering its excitement and affluence; and Turner created a suite of watercolors and gouaches that barely coalesce into legible scenes, rather more as ambient moods of light on water.
Venice, the Grand Canal looking East with Santa Maria della Salute, Canaletto around 1740
Canaletto’s formidable paintings, frighteningly beholden to the grid, impose a stately grandeur and insistent rigidity diametrically opposed to Monet’s intuitive transience. They render administrative power, mercantile prestige, and Grand Tour spectacle, produced amidst the political decline of the Republic and in the wake of the sumptuous and suffocating Christianity of Bellini, Titian, and Tintoretto.
A little over a decade before Monet’s visit, Venice inaugurated the Biennale di Venezia, a cultural super-event descending from the Crystal Palace exhibitions and world’s fairs and growing into a nationalistic arena, a watery Colosseum, in which power and culture compete on a global stage. Today, Venice exists as a year-round spectacle of art, finance, soft power, and attentional economies. In the current edition, Austrian artist Florentina Holzinger orchestrated a number of performances, which she describes as “highly complex compositions with a short duration, important material studies, and a peak intensity.” Her SEAWORLD VENICE features a cast of naked performers engaged in activities such as riding Jet Skis in circles inside a small gallery and sitting in tanks filled with water filtered from portable toilets that visitors are encouraged to use.
Florentina Holzinger: SEAWORLD VENICE, 2026, Austrian Pavilion, 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia
Abbas Akhavan: Entre chien et loup, 2026, Canada Pavilion, 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia
Montreal-based Abbas Akhavan, representing Canada in this edition, offered Entre chien et loup (Between Dog and Wolf), reimagining the Canadian Pavilion as a Wardian case—an early terrarium used to transport, among many other things, giant water lilies endemic to South America, favored by British colonial elites during the Victorian era and named after the Queen.
The exhibition concludes with a small photograph—a “selfie” avant la lettre—of Monet’s own reflection in a floating lily garden, a thoughtful curatorial gesture invoking the coming age of photography, already at work unsettling a painting tradition infused with broader cultural influences and beset by the epochal unrest of the industrial age, with its many social and ecological dislocations. Beside the photograph hangs a late painting: an animated limning of floating lilies suspended in a harmonious balance of water, light, and space.
If you should take a ferry from Honshu or Shikoku to Naoshima, the art-revitalized, postindustrial former fishing island, and on through the now rather overcomplicated app-based pilgrimage to see the monumentalized installations of artists from East and West proffering syncretic concepts of impermanence, quotidian beauty, and commodified spectacle, you’ll arrive, after walking through a shimmering water garden, at the Chichu Museum, where Tadao Ando has built a naturally lit subterranean den of white marble and luminous, softly curving walls for its collection of large, late Monet lilies. You’ll be invited to remove your shoes, walk into the cool cavern, and observe the ongoing transformation and relational becoming.
Chichu Art Museum, Monet Room, Yurika Kono
Monet and Venice is on view through July 26, 2026 at the de Young Museum