If the world seems like a dark place at the beginning of the present century, an exhibition of work completed at the beginning of the last may help put things back in a more optimistic perspective. "Monet -- Later Works: Homage to Katia Granoff," is on show at the Iwate Museum of Art till Feb. 11 and then travels to Sakura, Chiba Prefecture, and to Nagoya.
The first exhibition in Japan to focus exclusively on Monet's paintings of the water-garden he created next to his house in Giverny, this display pays special attention to the penultimate series of canvases produced in preparation for the artist's grand "Water Lilies" murals, now in the Musee de l'Orangerie in Paris.
Many of these paintings remained virtually unseen in Monet's studio after his death. That they were shown to a wider public and dispersed to collections internationally is thanks to art dealer Katia Granoff, born in Mykolaiv, Russia, in 1895.