Perhaps this is what it feels like to teeter on the edge of a black hole. Except it’s art that is pulling me into the void. Claude Monet’s Agapanthus Triptych (1916-19) reaches out to embrace the viewer in a shimmering world where soft reflections move on a bankless pond; a vast mirrored universe with lilies like supernovae. The Royal Academy proved the radicalism of Monet’s late art with its 1999 exhibition, Monet in the 20th Century.
This cosmic masterpiece, its three components owned by a trio of American museums and reunited here to overwhelming effect, is the final disorientating thrill in an exhibition of psychedelic modernist pastoral art that is a ravishing joy from start to finish. If you think an exhibition about gardens sounds a bit cosy or that Monet is just a pretty painter, then start at the end, with this painting that disrupts time and space as experimentally as any installation.