Brooklyn Museum Unveils Largest Monet Exhibition In Decades

The Brooklyn Museum has opened Monet and Venice, the largest presentation of Claude Monet’s work in New York in more than 25 years, offering visitors a deeply emotional, multisensory experience enhanced by an immersive sound installation powered by Genelec monitors.

The exhibition culminates in a striking 4.1.4 Dolby Atmos® environment featuring four Genelec 8330 two-way studio monitors in ear-level positions, four 8320 overhead monitors, and a 7350 subwoofer. The system delivers a symphonic score composed by the museum’s composer-in-residence, Niles Luther, with exceptional precision and spatial depth.

Co-curated by Lisa Small, the museum's Senior Curator of European Art, the exhibition places Monet’s 1908 Venetian paintings in dialogue with centuries of artistic depictions of Venice, from Canaletto through to the early 20th century. "This is the largest museum presentation of Monet’s work in 25 years in New York City," stated Small. "We wanted to create something that felt both emotional and innovative, something you can feel as much as see. The Genelec system and Niles’s score made that possible."

In the final gallery, Monet's Venetian masterpieces are accompanied by Luther's original multi-channel composition, fully realised in a down-rendered Atmos mix. "As the composer-in-residence, I wrote a symphonic multi-channel, 4.1.4, down-rendered Dolby Atmos installation in the final room where Monet's Venice paintings reside," stated Niles Luther. "I think the most difficult challenge was that this really advanced technology that we work with is not often present or available to encyclopedic museums. When you use sufficiently advanced technology and it’s deployed in a very careful, meticulous and thoughtful way, you get to this point where it almost becomes an illusion. It becomes like magic, and it's less about the technical details and more about how the work makes you feel. When you walk into that space, does it stop your heart? Does it make you catch your breath? We have achieved that in the final gallery room."

Luther added that translating Monet’s visual world into music was both an artistic and logistical challenge. "From the creative side, as a composer, part of the challenge was how do I take what’s contained in these paintings, and then translate them into the language of music. Write the score, give the score to musicians, go into the studio, rehearse, record, mix, master, install, – all within several months. We have Genelec for all the speakers, the 8330s at the ear level, four of them. And then for the 0.1, we have the sub, the 7350, and then four overheads, the 8320s, to give us a 4.1.4 fully supported Dolby Atmos mix. All of this was possible because we were able to calibrate it within GLM, and I was able to take my master file and just come into the museum and it just plays back beautifully on the calibrated system."

The Genelec Smart Active Monitoring system, combined with GLM calibration, enabled the museum’s technical team to overcome the challenges of the large, reverberant space. Through precise tuning, frequency balancing and reverberation control, the team created a transparent and natural listening environment that enhances the emotional power of Monet’s Venetian masterpieces.

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