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...
An advertising poster, you might think, is completely ephemeral -- just a sheet of paper that's here today, gone tomorrow, fading in the wind and rain and then pasted over by a newer, fresher advert. The most successful advertising, though, is anything but ephemeral. How many of those television commercials from your childhood still resonate today, for example? And as the advertising poster came into its own in late 19th-century Paris, it produced some of the most striking images in French art -- and became a collector's item in its own right. Now those posters can be seen en masse at the Musée d'Orsay in Art Is in the Street , a fun if somewhat bloated exhibition that gives due credit to the masters of the art: not just Alfons Mucha, Pierre Bonnard and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec , though they're here too, but also many others you've perhaps never heard of. This is a show that neatly brings together art and social history, often a winning formula in our eyes. An...