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The paintings came from the French Impressionist’s time in Italy with his wife, Alice, in 1908

Kayla Randall – Digital Editor, Museums

Venice was “too beautiful to be painted,” according to Claude Monet. Yet he painted the Italian city anyway.

In 1908, the famed French Impressionist and his wife, Alice, visited Venice. When they arrived, he told her that the city was “too beautiful” to paint, adding that he was “too old to paint such beautiful things.” He was in his late 60s at the time and didn’t want to go to the city in the first place, Lisa Small, senior curator of European art at the Brooklyn Museum, tells Smithsonian magazine. But his wife encouraged him to come with her on a holiday there, and eventually he agreed. He became enchanted by the location’s light and atmosphere and was able to overcome his doubts.

Monet spent two months in Venice and made 37 oil-on-canvas paintings inspired by his time there, 29 of which debuted in 1912 at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris. Now, the Brooklyn Museum has brought together 19 of Monet’s original Venetian paintings for a new exhibition, “Monet and Venice,” running from October 11 to February 1, 2026. After the show closes in Brooklyn, it will travel to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in March 2026.

Monet’s initial reluctance to paint the city was representative of his artistic anxiety, says Small. Venice had been painted so many times at that point and was heavily mythologized. “If you’re going to try your hand at something that other artists have been painting literally for 500 years … it’s got to be a little bit daunting,” she says.

One review of the 1912 exhibition found that Monet’s views of the city successfully showed “that there is no subject, however hackneyed it may seem, that cannot be renewed and magnified by interpretation.”

Now, in a review of the 2025 exhibition, ARTNews’ Alex Greenberger writes that the showcase “is nothing short of a revelation.”

Monet is best known for his paintings of water lilies; his paintings of Venice are thus generally lesser known.

“I was interested in focusing on this chapter in his career because it was so discreet,” says Small, who co-curated “Monet and Venice” with Melissa Buron, director of collections and chief curator of the Victoria and Albert Museum. While some of the Venice paintings have appeared in other shows over the years, the Brooklyn Museum’s new exhibition is the first “that really takes that group of work as its focus, as the heart of the exhibition since 1912,” Small adds.

Key takeaways: Monet’s time in Venice

• The artist visited Venice only once, on a 1908 holiday with his wife, Alice.
• His trip resulted in 37 paintings of the city, and 19 of them will be displayed at the Brooklyn Museum starting on October 11.

While Monet’s work is celebrated now, and he’s often credited with being the leader of the Impressionist movement, Small says that when he was painting, his work wasn’t as accepted.

His style, with its visible brushstrokes, bright colors and soft appearance, is ingrained and well recognized in the art world today. But it was radical in its time, and some critics didn’t like it, Small says.

As a curator of historical European art, she likes to note that “all art was contemporary at one time or another.”

Alongside Monet’s works, the museum will also feature visions of Venice by other artists, including Canaletto, John Singer Sargent and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. The Brooklyn Museum’s composer-in-residence, Niles Luther, wrote a symphony that plays in the final gallery of the exhibition. Luther traveled to Venice to find the same inspiration that Monet did, and his resulting symphony, Souvenir: Venise d’Après Monet, is meant to reflect the artist’s paintings and the city’s environment.

In addition to exploring Monet’s Venice paintings alongside the work of other artists, the exhibition also provides context on how the artworks fit into his own life and career. Monet was a perfect match for Venice because he “was a painter of water,” says Small.

“He was a painter of light for sure—we all know that from Impressionism—but he was a painter of water throughout his entire career,” the curator explains. “We wanted to really show how Venice as a theme, a place where you’re surrounded by water and buildings are reflected in the water, ended up being the perfect Monet motif—an artist obsessed with reflections.”

“Monet and Venice” is on view at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City from October 11 to February 1, 2026.

The new work is a “big step forward” in finding new ways to generate viable organs for human transplants, but it comes with some ethical considerations

Will Sullivan – Daily Correspondent

In hopes of generating organs for human transplants, scientists have grown middle-stage kidneys made partly of human cells inside pig embryos.

The achievement is “an important and interesting step,” but such transplants are still many years away, Massimo Mangiola, a transplant immunologist at New York University who did not contribute to the findings, tells Science News’ Amanda Heidt.

Still, the new achievement “hints that the ultimate goal of developing human organs in other mammals might be possible,” Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte, a developmental biologist at Altos Labs who was not involved with the research, tells Science’s Mitch Leslie. It “is a big step forward in the field.”

And for kidneys, in particular, growing the organs would be valuable: More than 106,000 people in the United States are currently on the national transplants waiting list for organs from deceased donors, and of these patients, 92,000 are awaiting a kidney, according to the American Kidney Fund. Most people wait three to five years to receive a donation of this blood-filtering organ, and every day, an estimated 13 people die before they can get a transplant. So, scientists are looking for alternatives, including generating organs inside other mammals.

Previously, researchers have achieved interspecies organ generation between mice and rats for organs including the pancreas, thymus and kidney, according to the new study, published last week in the journal Cell Stem Cell. This summer, researchers successfully transplanted a genetically modified pig kidney into a brain-dead patient. They’ve also grown human skeletal muscle and blood vessel lining in pig embryos, per Science. But no solid organs with human cells had previously been createdinside another creature, according to the study.Report This Ad

To achieve this, the team turned off two genes in the pig embryos that cause the development of kidneys, writes New Scientist’s Alice Klein. Then, they genetically tweaked human stem cells in order to make them more likely to survive in the pig embryos and added these cells to the embryos.

The researchers next transferred 1,820 pig embryos with human cells into sow surrogates. After 25 days, they collected two normal embryos and four degenerating ones, and they extracted an additional three normal embryos after 28 days. In the normally developing embryos, human cells made up between 50 and 65 percent of the kidneys.

“It is remarkable to see that about 60 percent of the primordial pig kidney contained human cells,” Jun Wu, a stem cell biologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center who did not contribute to the findings, tells Wired’s Emily Mullin.

Still, the study has some drawbacks. In early development, embryos only grow temporary kidneys—and the kidneys that would be used for organ transplants are a different kind that forms later, Science writes.The human stem cells also grew into only a couple of the more than 70 human kidney cell types, per Science News, and a completely human organ would likely be needed for transplant, since pig cells may be rejected by the body.Report This Ad

Paul Knoepfler, a stem cell biologist at the University of California, Davis, who did not contribute to the findings, tells Wired that two of the human genes the researchers edited could cause cancer if overexpressed, something that would need to be tested in the organs grown in pigs.

The research could also cause ethical quandaries if the pigs were brought to term and the human cells got into their brains and reproductive cells, the team writes. In the new study, the embryos’ brains and spinal cords did have some cells from humans.

Researchers may need to genetically alter the human cells in the future to prevent this spread into other parts of the pigs, Miguel Esteban, a co-author of the study and stem cell biologist at the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health, tells Science. However, Mangiola tells Science News that the human neurons in the embryos seem random and therefore probably wouldn’t lead to human brains.

To further the research, the team has received approval to let the embryos grow for up to 35 days, per New Scientist.

“The ability to generate human organs in pigs would make a significant impact in reducing the number of patients on a [transplant] waiting list in the United States and around the world,” Mary Garry, a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota who did not contribute to the paper, tells Wired.