The Art Exhibitions Blog

What a lot of new exhibitions this October! We list well over 20 across Europe below -- many more than usual -- and have still had to leave out quite a few that we'd mention in most other months in order to keep this post to a reasonable length. Let's start at the Royal Academy in London with deep blue seas, cloudless skies, intense light and the heat of the sun. From October 2 to January 31, you can experience the excitement Renoir, Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso and many others felt while  Painting the French Riviera . The exhibition features more than 160 exhibits from the 1870s to the 1960s, and a version of the show travels on to the  Cleveland Museum of Art in March.  Hmm, Renoir. Now perhaps seen as the most chocolate-boxy of the Impressionists, but without doubt the creator of some of the most recognisable images in French art of the late 19th century. Well worth stealing , and clearly the National Gallery is on to a winner with its  Renoir and Love  ex...

Winter is approaching in the French village of Giverny, the home of Claude Monet, and so the flowers are dying back in his glorious gardens, even those famous waterlilies in the lake that were such an inspiration for his paintings. But just down the road, at the Musée des impressionnismes, summer lives on, and the blooms are vibrant, celebrating the power of flowers in art. We called in to the museum just before Monet's Garden closed for the season, possibly the only people among the many hundreds of visitors in the village that day who'd gone to Giverny specifically to see the exhibition called Flower Power . We weren't disappointed; the curators have put together an opulent bouquet of painting, sculpture, photography and design.  The Musée des impressionnismes is, we suspect, a bit of an irrelevance to the great mass of tourists in Giverny determined to tick the footbridge over Monet's lily pond off their selfie photo list. But for the more discerning art-lover like y...

Edward Burne-Jones was a terrific draughtsman and a highly accomplished painter. So why is this new exhibition of his work at Tate Britain so remarkably dissatisfying? Perhaps because it seems almost impossible to relate to his pictures, certainly from a modern perspective. There are religious works and the odd portrait, but most of what Burne-Jones was painting and designing in the second half of the 19th century was his own interpretation of classical antiquity, medieval chivalry or fairy tales. Clearly, the Pre-Raphaelites, of whom Burne-Jones was the last major figure, and William Morris's Arts & Crafts movement, with which he was closely associated, took the view that the Victorian industrial age was a terrible thing, and they wanted to hark back to what they saw as a purer, gentler, more enlightened era. But Burne-Jones was born in 1833, a year after Manet and a year before Whistler and Degas. They took on the modern world. Burne-Jones just seems to have retreated into...

October sees the start of a series of exhibitions that promise to be exceptional, bringing together works of art that may never again be viewable in the same place at the same time. Museums and galleries across Europe aren't stinting on the superlatives. Two of the greatest artists of the Italian Renaissance come together at London's National Gallery for a show its director describes as "unprecedented and probably unrepeatable". Andrea Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini were brothers-in-law, and Mantegna's compositional innovations and Bellini's natural landscapes play a pivotal role in art history. With pictures loaned from around Europe and beyond, it runs from October 1 to January 27. Mantegna inspired Edward  Burne-Jones ,   and Tate Britain is giving   the late Pre-Raphaelite  his first major retrospective in London for more than 40 years. Over 150 works aim to show how Burne-Jones developed into one of the leading European, and not just British, artists...