Take this show on the road Art exhibits to spice up your holiday travel

ART EXHIBITS TO SPICE UP YOUR HOLIDAY TRAVEL

Thanksgiving is a time for communing with family and friends, but for many Santa Feans, it also means travel. Maybe you’ll find yourself in Denver or Los Angeles in the next few weeks. When you’re done feasting and it’s time to walk off all that pumpkin pie, consider these enticing exhibitions, and feast your eyes on art.

Claude Monet: The Truth of Nature Denver Art Museum, through Feb. 2

This not-to-be missed exhibition devoted to French Impressionist Claude Monet features more than 120 paintings that span the artist’s career and is the most comprehensive showing of his work in decades. Monet was known for depicting the atmospheric changes in a landscape at various times of day or over the course of the seasons. The show covers his search for new vistas as he traveled beyond his home in Normandy, to London, Norway, and the Mediterranean. The Truth of Nature also explores the vanishing human presence in his work, as he increasingly isolated himself from public life and sought immersion in the world of nature. The exhibition was organized by the Denver Art Museum and Museum Barberini, in Potsdam, Germany. This is the only venue where you can see the show in the United States. 100 W. 14th Ave. Parkway, Denver, 720-865-5000, denverartmuseum.org

The poet Charles Baudelaire called artist Constantin Guys “the painter of modern life.” He could have said the same about the famed provocateur Édouard Manet. Manet made waves with his 1863 painting

which the Paris Salon refused to exhibit, and his work is now considered pivotal in ushering in the modern era of art.

showcases a different side of the French painter, whose work changed dramatically in his later years. The show explores, in depth, the period after Manet transitioned from realism to Impressionism and includes his numerous portraits — from barmaids to the bourgeoisie — rendered in oils and pastels. Also included are sketches and watercolors he put in the margins of letters to friends while convalescing from debilitating leg pain in the spa town of Bellevue. Rounding out the show are examples of the lush still lifes and intimate garden scenes that were among his last works. 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles, 310-440-7300, getty.edu/museum

Yayoi Kusama, You Who are Getting Obliterated in the Dancing Swarm of Fireflies (2005), mixed media installation with LED lights; collection of Phoenix Art Museum, courtesy the museum

Claude Monet’s Grainstacks, Snow Effect (1891), courtesy Shelburne Museum