It is difficult to grasp that Impressionism was once the most hated of all art movements. During the 19th century, long before the Impressionists, the Realists had removed gods, mythology, and history from their paintings. This caused problems for audiences who were used to the idea that high art demanded equally lofty subject matter. With Impressionism, though, the consensus was that painters went one step too far: Artists dissolved space and form into so many bits of colored light, and left viewers not only without a proper subject, but literally with nothing to hold onto and no place to stand. And no painter dissolved the world as beautifully as Claude Monet, who is the subject of an astounding exhibit at Wildenstein & Co.

The term “museum-quality” is often bandied about when referring to gallery shows, and certainly none of us is starved for Impressionist paintings, especially by Monet. He is one of the most popular, oft-exhibited, and reproduced artists. Usually we get him in small doses, and often in mixed company. But Wildenstein’s show of 62 paintings spanning Monet’s entire oeuvre, the largest survey of the artist to be held in New York in more than 30 years, is not just museum-worthy: It is a knockout.

If you think you know — or have seen enough of — Monet, whose posters of haystacks, bridges, and water lilies wallpaper so many lobbies and hotel rooms, be prepared for a show that will re-establish him as one of the greatest perceptual colorists of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The Wildenstein show, organized by Joseph Baillio, is a tribute to the art dealers Daniel Wildenstein (1917–2001) and Katia Granoff (1895–1989). Wildenstein put together the catalogue raisonné of Monet, and the Paris-based Granoff is responsible for garnering, at mid-century, wider appeal for the artist’s late work. The show is arranged chronologically in four galleries, including a room devoted to the artist’s letters, and it is very well-chosen and dense.

The paintings are tightly packed, and the exhibit is not filled-out with second-class Monets. It includes great early still lifes and unusual works done in various hands — from soft, airy, and brushy, as in “The Valley of the Nervia and Dolceacqua” (1884), to thick and swirling, as in the Soutine-like late picture “The Weeping Willow, Giverny” (1920–22). It also includes textbook masterpieces such as “The Gare Saint-Lazare, the Normandy Train” (1877), on loan from the Art Institute of Chicago, and views of haystacks, water lilies, the Palazzo Ducale in Venice, and Rouen Cathedral. There is a grouping of three late paintings (stamped, not signed) of dubious quality in the exhibit. (To my eye, they look unfinished.) Otherwise, nearly every work is memorable. This includes the weird picture of the artist’s wife and son, “Camille and Jean Monet in the Garden at Argenteuil” (1873), in which the two somewhat robotic figures, swallowed by vegetation, play second fiddle to the painter’s obsession with the flowering trees and bushes.

What is startling in the show is Monet’s acuity at nailing down the exact atmosphere of a particular time and place. With the doggedness of a scientist, he painted the same subject over and over in different seasons, weather, and light. Walking through the exhibit is like having windows thrown open onto beaches, gardens, rivers, mountains, cities, farms, and ponds in winter, spring, summer, and fall — flooding the galleries with different kinds of atmosphere and light.

The paintings of some lesser Impressionists come off as systematic, rather than felt — as if the painters adopted the style of daubing and built pictures through bits of color because it was fashionable to do so. But Monet’s ever-changing hand constantly adapts to the motif. It’s as if the artist’s style was reborn with each canvas, as if he painted in a particular way on a particular day because it was the only way he could capture a particular light on canvas.

Some pictures are dense, just short of impenetrable, such as the three paintings titled “The Japanese footbridge” (all 1918–24), in which thickened, rough paint uncannily transforms into air, translucency, and openness. The two violet, mint- and yellow-green pictures “A Spring Landscape” (both 1894) are thick and chalky. Their color is heavily loaded with yellow and white, yet the pictures, which convey spring’s first-flowering, never become acidic or opaque.

Other pictures, hardly there at all, drift through the canvases like mist. In “Fishing Boats at Honfleur” (1866), a cool, shadowy cluster of docked boats in a harbor, Monet conveys, with opaque white over black and brown, hazy, late afternoon sky. In “Seaside at Honfleur” (1864), a pebbled beach at midday, the artist gets exactly that scintillating, moist, sun-drenched, sandy air that makes you squint and blink. I could almost hear the seagulls. “A Palm Tree in Bordighera” (1884), in which the palms splay outward like a starburst, is silken, almost muggy.

“Woman Reading” (1872), a lush canvas of a woman in a long, flowing, white gown sitting in the sundappled shade of a tree, is bathed in summer heat. Filtered through the leaves, the light is bright yellow, lime green, purple, and pink. The woman, whose dress pools around her, appears to float like a pearly cloud above the lawn. “View of Vétheuil, Ice Floes” (1880–81), a bluish violet and white picture of a snow-covered skyline and frazzle ice on the river, is positively chilly. A creamy, yellowish fog drifts above the town, evoking that silvery, pre-dusk glow of a winter afternoon.

Monet gives us quivering surfaces. He conveys mist in the sunlight and wind in the grasses. His pictures bring us every kind of light and weather. Yet, as natural and straight-ahead as his paintings are, his trees can burn like sparklers, and his kaleidoscopic haystacks, buildings, skies, and water can feel as if they are on fire. For Monet, nature was a goddess, and light, the artist understood, is a force that burns from within.

Until June 15 (Wildenstein & Co., Inc., 19 E. 64th St., between Fifth and Madison avenues, 212-879-0500).