Correcting a terrible post-renovation mistake, MOMA has reinstalled Claude Monet’s “Water Lilies,” a nearly forty-two-foot-long triptych, along with related paintings, in a room of its wondrous own, with a couch. Bring a snorkel. Dry paint never made for wetter effects than in the engulfing expositions of the Giverny ponds and gardens, which filled the last years of the artist, as he adjusted to the handicap of cataracts. (He died in 1926.) Get as close as you like to the nubbly surfaces of the triptych, with its candid brushstrokes that skitter and clot; your gaze will stay drenched in an aqueous sublime. Pinkish summer clouds aren’t so much reflected as drowned in turquoise, violet, and mud-green depths. Monet knew palpably, at each point, what all his colors were up to. Everything answers, resoundingly, to everything else. The tone of the next biggest, single-panel panorama is a soprano, silvery shimmer, suggesting water less than polychrome steam. Smaller canvases include “The Japanese Footbridge”—with its startling reds—and a moist fury of flowering agapanthus.

Claude Monet’s Water Lilies at MOMA : The New Yorker

don’t forget your earplugs either.  we were there a few weeks ago for the members preview - hoping for calm - but instead found ourselves in turbulent water, if  we take schjeldahl’s analogy.  apparently children are no longer threatened with bodily harm by their parents when they are loud in “quiet” places.  either that, or we were supposed to celebrate in the genius of interpretative dance that sprung from these children who, like fishes, dove in and out of the crowd, splashing about, and making me want to find the nearest metal hook and rod.