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...
Some of the landscapes in Thomas Cole: Eden to Empire at the National Gallery in London are ravishing, but they carry more of a political subtext than you might expect, with messages that are still relevant today. Cole, the great American landscape artist of the early 19th century, was concerned by increasing urbanisation and industrialisation in a United States making rapid advances into its as yet largely unsettled interior. His paintings contain warnings about the ecological costs of unchecked development. Perhaps we should know more about Cole, because he was actually born in Bolton in 1801, spent his early years working in textile mills in Lancashire and emigrated to the US with his family while still in his teens. But his paintings are largely in American collections, and that's where the 58 works on show at the National mostly come from. Cole was a self-taught painter, and he enjoyed early artistic success with bold views of the Catskill Mountains in New York state in...