Seasoned museumgoers are wary of any show with the word “Unknown” in its title, especially when coupled with an artist as ubiquitous as Monet. But “The Unknown Monet: Pastels and Drawings,” at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., organized by James Ganz and Richard Kendall, offers a fresh perspective on one of the most popular artists of all time, and a chance to rethink some artistic orthodoxiesabouttherelationshipbetween drawing and painting. Even if some of the claims of its curators run away with themselves, the exhibition includes significant and rarely seen works that fully justify a trip north.

Drawing is the overlooked medium within Monet’s oeuvre, in large part thanks to the master himself. With a genius for selfpromotion, Monet spun many myths about himself, playing the mass media of his day. He put out the idea that he simply had no faculty for drawing, that his instinct was to attack the canvas without the customary planning and preparation. This put all the emphasis on paint, on swift response, and on spontaneous choices of color.

Monet knew the implications of such an approach for a nation steeped in the time-honored notion of, in Ingres’s immortal phrase, the “probity of drawing.” During the Renaissance, Vasari had made a distinction between disegno and colorito — line and color — stressing that the Florentine School (his own) was more for the former, the Venetians for the latter. The French Academy, tracing its lineage through Ingres and Poussin, was firmly for disegno. Monet — already proving himself anti-academic by choosing landscape, low in the hierarchy, as his genre — signaled revolution with the implication that he could manage without drawing.

At the same time, Monet was also presenting himself as something of a “noble savage.” The selfmythology of an artist who quit his art school (the Académie Suisse, which he attended briefly, in Paris, in 1859–60) to get back to his true love, which was working directly from nature, tied in with another biographical detail — that he overcame a philistine background and was lured to art by the power of landscape. A pure child of nature, in other words.

A previously overlooked source of information, the memoirs of one Comte Théophile Beguin Billecocq, the show explains, sheds a totally different light on Monet’s artistic beginnings. His mother, who died when he was 16, ran a sophisticated salon in Le Havre, and although his merchant father was more interested in commerce and geography, he was supportive of her interests. As a boy, Monet was an avid draftsman. Not only did he sketch the environs — cliffs and boats — but he also set himself up as a caricaturist, earning pocket money from humorous drawings of local personalities.

The caricatures on display at the Clark Institute, which, along with adolescent nature studies, form the first room of this exhibition, have indisputable charm. A series of local types depict a dandy with a cigar, a youth with a monocle, and an artist in a pointed hat, drawn in pencil and highlighted in gouache. More substantial are portraits done in the style of Daumier or the photographer Nadar, with enormous heads and pronounced features. These lack the element of cruelty of good satire, but they demonstrate an important point: Monet was a more than able draftsman.

Drawing, the curators propose, played a more significant role in the evolution of Monet’s Impressionist style than has previously been admitted. That Monet’s first instructor in plein air oil painting had been Eugène Boudin in Le Havre is well known. Overlooked, they argue, is the fact that Boudin also encouraged Monet to sketch.

Monet made around a dozen drawings in black chalk of the Normandy coast, including “Cliffs and Sea, Sainte-Adresse” (1864), in which the presence and texture of the rock is conveyed through emphatic scribble and a kind of robust calligraphy. “Houses by the Sea” (1864) uses swathes of rubbed chalk to give a sense of shadow as a rich, complex mass, as much the form in the picture as the distinct houses or distant sea.

Important early paintings like the “Luncheon on the Grass,” now in the Pushkin, are shown to have had preliminary sketches, but this is hardly a major surprise. How could a complex, multi-figure composition have come together without careful planning? The exhibition juxtaposes an oil study for the painting from the National Gallery of Art with chalk drawings, including “Figure of a Woman (Camille)” (c. 1865), of his future wife. That the sketches were useful for the artist in making the picture, however, does not prove that they are essential for us in seeing it.

When Monet took part in the first exhibition of the group that would come to be the Impressionists at Nadar’s studio in 1874, he showed seven pastels alongside his canvases, but would later exclude the medium, at which he worked privately, from his public outings. The pastels, the curators argue, have subsequently been overlooked as an important aspect of Monet’s oeuvre. While the catalogue raisonné produced by Daniel Wildenstein in a limited edition in the 1990s included a volume devoted to works on paper, this was omitted from the popular edition of the catalog published by Taschen, perpetuating a diminished view of graphic works traceable to the artist himself. Most of the pastels remain in private collections rather than institutions, reflecting a similar bias.

Pastel was clearly a medium in which Monet excelled, and through which he recorded immediate sensory and chromatic impressions of the landscape, in situ. They are the real glory of this show. “Étretat, the Manneporte at Low Tide” (c. 1885) uses the medium to capture the looming yet misty presence of the familiar landmass, a promontory on the Normandy coast through which a large arch has been eroded. Through draftsmanly touch, he is able to convey a sense of the muscularity of stone in a way that is strangely visceral. “Sainte-Andresse, View Across the Estuary” (c. 1865–70) gorgeously evokes a sense of soft grass working its way down to the water with a lone cloud hovering in the sky. “The Meadow Lined With Trees” (c. 1870–80) exquisitely places the bare tree trunks as perfunctory jabs of line against the lush, thick strokes of blue and white in the sky and contrastive greens of the ground. This work, also in gouache, is on loan from the Musée Marmottan, the largest public collection of the pastels.

The show seems to argue that we need to rethink Monet’s painting in the light of his drawing, but in truth we can simply enjoy his drawing in light of his painting: Whether filling sketchbooks with loose, fast scribbles or patiently building compositions in pastel, Monet was a supremely painterly draftsman. To class pastel as drawing is, in a way, a bureaucratic rather than an aesthetic decision, having more to do with where to store them, how to catalogue them, and how to price them than with artistic process or visual thinking. Like watercolors, they are paintings that happen to be on paper.

The sketchbooks, the pages of which are available on computer terminals in the exhibition and are posted on the Clark Institute’s Web site, are miraculous in their economy and ingenious in their personal notation. With slight modulation of emphasis, Monet is able to register broad differentiations of tone, as in his quick sketch of “The Gare Saint-Lazare (Suburban Lines)” (1877). It is little revelation, and certainly no scandal, that Monet made preliminary doodles that give a vague structural sense of his late water lily murals from around 1918 onward. In these sketches and in the brief jottings made before Rouen Cathedral, the subject of one of his series of paintings, he is much more interested in plotting a painting than he is in representing the world. In his mind’s eye, the painting was already taking shape as he drew. As he said, “I have never liked to separate drawing from color.”

Until September 16 (225 South St., Williamstown, Mass., 413-458-2303).