SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA – When you think of Claude Monet, you probably instinctively picture water lilies and beautiful bridges.
The Monet exhibit currently at the de Young Museum in San Francisco includes plenty of those things. But it also showcases a dramatically different chapter of Monet’s career and life: his time in Venice.
“Monet and Venice” was co-organized with the Brooklyn Museum, where it was shown before making its way to San Francisco. The exhibition focuses on the artist’s time in the Italian city, presenting it as a story of creative inspiration, late-career renewal, and artistic revival. I stopped by to check it out for Bay Area Telegraph.
The exhibition is set up across multiple galleries and unfolds as a fairly linear narrative as you walk from room to room.
As you first enter, historical photographs and early films of Venice help set the scene. Remarkably, the Lumiere brothers — among the earliest pioneers of moving pictures — were filming Venice around the same era that Monet visited the city in the early 20th century…