(Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times)  Sometimes a museum exhibition that sounds like a natural turns out to be anything but. That’s the odd case with a new show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which juxtaposes five gorgeous paintings by Impressionist icon Claude Monet (1840-1926) with five handsome ones by Pop master Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997). For all the visual firepower of the individual works, as a show it’s strangely flat and uninvolving.

By all means don’t miss it — if not for the Lichtensteins, which have been shown at LACMA before (they belong to L.A. collectors Eli and Edythe Broad), then for the Monets. I doubt that five paintings from his pivotal series showing the soaring Gothic facade of Rouen Cathedral have ever been seen at once in Los Angeles before, and these five are fantastic.