Lisa Small – författare

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.

The years between the Revolution of 1848 and the end of World War II were characterised by profound social, intellectual and political change in France. The art world, centred in Paris, also witnessed remarkable transformations as artists experimented with bold, expressive styles – Realism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Symbolism, Fauvism, Cubism and Surrealism – that soon joined the Western artistic canon.This splendid volume, refreshed with new artworks, feature masterpieces from the Brooklyn Museum’s renowned European collection, marking France as the centre of international modernism from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century. Ranging in scale, subject and style, these paintings and sculptures were produced by the era’s leading artists, both French-born and others who studied and worked in France. Artists represented include Cézanne, Chagall, Courbet, Degas, Derain, Matisse, Monet, Morisot, Renoir, Rodin and Vuillard.Organised into four sections, the works in French Moderns exemplify the successive avant-garde movements that defined modern art in the 19th and 20th centuries, tracing a shift from naturalism to the rise of abstraction. The themes of ‘Landscape’, ‘Still Life’, ‘Portraits and Figures’ and ‘The Nude’ reveal illuminating comparisons and contrasts across time and mediums.This new revised and updated hardback edition is published to coincide with an exhibition touring the USA: Portland Art Museum, OR (June 8–Sept 15, 2024; Columbia Museum of Art, SC (Oct 5, 2024–Jan, 2025); Vero Beach Museum of Art, FL (Feb 1–June 22, 2025); Harn Museum of Art, Gainesville, FL (Aug 5, 2025–Jan 4, 2026); Birmingham Museum of Art, AL (Jan 30–May 24, 2026).