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...

It's not opening until September 10, but tickets to see The Bayeux Tapestry at the British Museum go on sale at 1000 on July 1, so if you want to see it this year you'll probably need to get in early. Follow the link for details. Booking for the rest of the run, from January 1 through to July 11, 2027, will open later in 2026. If you've never seen this most astounding of historical artefacts in its natural habitat in Normandy, you'll want to seize the chance in London.  But what about this month? Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller (1793-1865) is regarded as one of Austria's finest 19th-century painters, and there's a free single-room show devoted to his views of the Alps, Vienna and Sicily from July 2 at the National Gallery. Waldmüller: Landscapes  is on till September 20.  Richard Dadd (1817-1886) was already known as a successful painter of Shakespearean fairy scenes before he began experiencing delusions, leading him to kill his father. Confined to Bethlem and Broa...

Georges Seurat was on to something when he moved on from Impressionism to develop the radically different painting technique popularly known as Pointillism. He and his followers applied unmixed dots of pure colour to their canvases, separate little spots of paint that, the theory went, would come together in the eye of the viewer to create glowing, luminous pictures.  Seurat died young, and Pointillism didn't really hang around for very long either. But it produced some gorgeous art, and 50 or so of its finest creations are gathered at the National Gallery in London in  Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller's Neo-Impressionists . It's a glorious, light-filled, uplifting exhibition, and the most enjoyable show we've been to all year. "Art is harmony," Seurat said, and it's hard to argue with that in this show. These pictures are Helene Kröller-Müller's Neo-Impressionists, by the way, because more than half of them come from the Kröller-Müller Museum i...

A month ago, we published a preview of November's new exhibitions, only to find within a few hours that the new coronavirus lockdown in England had rendered half of it irrelevant. Still, with the reintroduction of a tier system and the builders in at Buckingham Palace, there's a lot more certainty about December's openings.... The Picture Gallery at the Palace is home to a truly stunning collection of Old Master paintings, but it's a location the public really only gets the chance to tour when the royal residence is open in the summer (and we've noticed on our visits to Buck House that many a tourist just sees the fabulous art on the walls as part of the opulent decor). With the palace's wiring and water pipes now being updated, there's the opportunity to appreciate 65 of those paintings in the purpose-built Queen's Gallery next door. Masterpieces from Buckingham Palace features Vermeer, Rembrandt, Titian, Canaletto and van Dyck, among others. Even if t...

Pablo Picasso kicks off the exhibition year in London, with Picasso and Paper  at the Royal Academy bringing together more than 300 works from an 80-year career. Drawing, printmaking, collage and even paper sculpture all feature in this show, running from January 25 to April 13. Just outside the capital, we've enjoyed a couple of shows recently at the Lightbox in Woking, and their new exhibition is David Hockney: Ways of Working . It will look at how one of Britain's most popular artists has explored the possibilities of a wide range of media over 60 years. January 25 to April 19. Edward Hopper  is the subject of the first big show of the year at the Fondation Beyeler, just outside Basel. It will focus on Hopper's landscapes and cityscapes, and it's been put together with the Whitney Museum in New York, which holds the largest collection of his works. January 26 to May 17. Also on in Switzerland, from January 24 to May 24: Canada and Impressionism at the Fonda...

Take a good look at this man; he was very famous in Paris a century ago. You might think he was a magician, possibly a circus ringmaster or a fairground proprietor. Wrong on all counts; he was an anarchist, albeit one who worked for the War Ministry, and he became one of the most influential art critics and collectors in France. His name was  Félix Fénéon , and you can find out all about him and the art he championed in an absolutely splendid exhibition at the Musée de l'Orangerie in the French capital, a show that's full of surprises and delights. Fénéon was a huge promoter of Neo-Impressionism (a description he coined), and it was the Pointillist Paul Signac who portrayed him in the painting above. That swirling, mesmerising, multi-coloured, almost psychedelic background? It was based on the pattern for a kimono in a collection of Japanese pictures that Signac owned. This was cutting-edge art in 1891, and Signac and Fénéon were at the sharp end. Fénéon is certainly a d...