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...
The pace at which art developed at the end of the 19th and start of the 20th century was astonishing. After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art at the National Gallery in London provides a crash course in the new paths painters and sculptors across Europe were taking over the three decades from the final Impressionist exhibition in Paris in 1886 to the start of World War I. It's an absolutely absorbing, hugely enjoyable show. Much of what was new and shocking then is now very familiar, but this exhibition also manages to surprise at times; we certainly saw quite a bit of work we hadn't seen before. If there was a father of modern art, it was perhaps Paul Cezanne. His Bathers (Les Grandes Baigneuses) confronts you as you enter the show, its monumental figures flanked by an equally monumental plaster cast by Auguste Rodin for his Monument to Balzac , the great French novelist. But to appreciate just how different Cezanne was from what went before, look at this portrait ...