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...
One of the most exciting exhibitions on in Paris at the moment is Les Nabis et le Décor at the Musée du Luxembourg, showing how Vuillard, Denis, Bonnard and others created truly stunning interior designs in the final decade of the 19th century. The Nabis took their name from the Hebrew word for prophet, and if you want to see how they were inspired, the place to go is the Musée d'Orsay, where there's a show centred on the painting that sparked an artistic revolution. It's called Sérusier's The Talisman , a Prophecy of Colour , and the picture is just 27 x 21 centimetres, painted in oil on wood by Paul Sérusier in October 1888. Sérusier was staying in Pont-Aven in Brittany with Paul Gauguin. Earlier that year, he'd been painting in a fairly conventional style, as we see elsewhere in this show, but now, as Maurice Denis related a decade and a half later, he listened to the guidance Gauguin gave him: "How do you see these trees? They are yellow. So, put ...