No wonder Denver is eating it up. Those huge crowds about to step into the Denver Art Museum will be overloaded with fine and familiar material — those ponds and poplars, those bridges, boats and, of course, water lilies that Monet is known for, and all reflected in studied light and shadow. If this exhibit is, indeed, supper for the soul, then it is drawn from the Sunday dinners your mother used to make, and it will nourish just as you expected. Info at or denverartmuseum. It is timeless in ways that are good and bad. That is to say, it is an authentic, scholarly and well-organized trip into the late 19th and early 20th century world of Monet. But it chooses not to connect, beyond ways that are implicit, to the realities of nature or art in the troubled era we live in. Under director Christoph Heinrich, the museum has honed its skills as an organizer of high-quality shows and as a respected institution that can wrangle loans of precious objects from other museums. Those are significan...