Was there any pressing need, apart from the considerable (if unfashionable) pleasure of seeing a lot of fine pictures, for the Art Institute of Chicago to organize a major Monet retrospective, his largest exhibition to date, drawn from public and private collections all over the world?[1] Over the past few years, the art of Monet and his colleagues has been probed from every possible direction. Recently, “Origins of Impressionism” studied the young Monet and his fellow New Painters in relation to both the establishment and the radical artists of their day, while the Art Institute’s own brilliant “series” exhibition examined Monet’s repetitions and variations of his favorite motifs. The lush survey of his late work, “Monet’s Years at Giverny; was a while ago–1978–but a representative mini-Monet retrospective can be seen any day at the Metropolitan, not to mention the spectacular three-panel Water Lilies at MOMA, which attracts a perpetual worshipful crowd.

The cynical answer to the question is a resounding “yes” for purely mercenary reasons. Impressionism and Monet are box-office at museums these days and can do a great deal to attract much-needed funds. (I suspect that attendance at Chicago’s retrospective would have been just as high if the museum had resisted billing Monet as “perhaps the most famous artist of all time . . . known and loved as the pioneer of Impressionism who changed the way we see the world.”) But the answer is also a resounding “yes” for wholly non-cynical reasons. It’s difficult