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...
Google The Great Wave , surely the most widely known, the most easily identifiable image in Japanese art, and, in less than a second, you'll get more than 1 billion results, some of which might even tell you something about its creator, the great painter and printmaker Katsushika Hokusai. Of course, in the days before the Internet and search engines, you'd have needed to get some sort of reference book off the shelf to find out about something like that. Where to turn first? An encyclopedia, possibly. The Great Picture Book of Everything : that sounds perfect.... let's see; it's got depictions of plants and animals, distant lands and distant peoples, myths and gods, inventions. Who's created the illustrations? Wow, Hokusai himself.... Hokusai: The Great Picture Book of Everything at the British Museum in London puts on public display for the first time more than 100 drawings Hokusai made in the 1820s to 1840s for an encyclopedia that was never actually published....