Exhibition of the week Monet & Architecture

National Gallery, London WC2 (020-7747 2885, www.nationalgallery.org.uk). Until 29 July

Claude Monet (18401926) is “one of art’s guaranteed crowdpleasers”, said Mark Hudson in The Daily Telegraph. Indeed, such is the impressionist master’s popularity that museums have devoted major exhibitions to seemingly every aspect of his life and work: his paintings of water lilies, the Normandy coast, gardens and even haystacks have all been “raked over in blockbuster after blockbuster”. The difficulty for museum curators is to find anything fresh to say about him – a challenge to which the National Gallery has now risen with this intriguing new exhibition. The show investigates the artist’s hitherto unexplored interest in architecture, bringing together more than 75 paintings depicting everything from Venetian palaces and Paris boulevards to the foggy banks of the River Thames. The result is a display rammed with “magnificent, life-enhancing” paintings that will “make the heart sing”. Arguably the show somewhat “overstates” the importance of buildings in Monet’s paintings, but it shows off his “radical vision” to “spine-tingling” effect.

There are indeed some glorious pictures here, said Laura Cumming in The Observer. We see the light streaming in through the “sloping glass roof” of Paris’s newly completed Gare SaintLazare, and a view of Amsterdam “so hazy it’s nearly vanishing

from the canvas” – while the “exhilarating” The Path through the Cliff at Varengeville

(1882) presents the eponymous track as a “hot, dark gully leading to a tantalising glimpse of wild blue yonder”, and is “intensified” by a cottage glimpsed in the distance. At its best, this is a “rapturous” show, said Jackie Wullschlager in the FT. However, there are moments when it “falls short”: it contains too many “so-so rural scene fillers”, and its theme would have “dumbfounded” the artist himself. Given that Monet never actually mentioned an interest in architecture, the exhibition’s premise “sits awkwardly with his work”.

Yet it hardly matters when the paintings are so ravishing, said Rachel Campbell-johnston in The Times. Indeed, you can’t help but marvel at how colour “dances across the surface” of the pictures here, dissolving them into “a shimmering haze” of light. The show’s chronological layout comes to a “stunning climax” with Monet’s “foggily atmospheric London skylines”, along with a series of extraordinary views of Rouen Cathedral and, finally, his “glimmering” paintings of Venice. The focus on architecture may be dubious, but it doesn’t matter. “You don’t need intellectual excuses to enjoy this show – just quite simply delight in it.”