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...
Paris -- there's always so much art to see, so many blockbuster shows of big-name artists in big-name museums. Sometimes, though, there's a lot of pleasure to be had from getting to know a less familiar painter in a much more intimate setting. Such as when we went to see Maximilien Luce: The Instinct for Landscape at the Musée de Montmartre. Luce painted light-filled landscapes in the 1890s following the Divisionist and Pointillist examples of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, and these would be attractive enough on their own, but there's a lot more to discover in this quite extensive exhibition. There are pictures of men at work, building Paris, and of industry, producing the raw materials for the modern world. Some of these paintings of Belgium's Black Country are very dark indeed. And late on in his career, more light-bathed idylls of life in a riverside village in a rather different neo-Impressionist style. Now, even though Luce was a Parisian (he lived and worked...