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...
Winter is approaching in the French village of Giverny, the home of Claude Monet, and so the flowers are dying back in his glorious gardens, even those famous waterlilies in the lake that were such an inspiration for his paintings. But just down the road, at the Musée des impressionnismes, summer lives on, and the blooms are vibrant, celebrating the power of flowers in art. We called in to the museum just before Monet's Garden closed for the season, possibly the only people among the many hundreds of visitors in the village that day who'd gone to Giverny specifically to see the exhibition called Flower Power . We weren't disappointed; the curators have put together an opulent bouquet of painting, sculpture, photography and design. The Musée des impressionnismes is, we suspect, a bit of an irrelevance to the great mass of tourists in Giverny determined to tick the footbridge over Monet's lily pond off their selfie photo list. But for the more discerning art-lover like y...