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 perhaps the portraits that provide some of the most memorable images in Virginia Woolf: an exhibition inspired by her writings at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester. There are 80 women artists featured in this show aiming to build on Woolf's perspectives on feminism and creaticity -- quite a contrast from Chichester's last, testosterone-laden Pop Art exhibition. Considering how tough it was for many of them to make their way in a male-dominated environment, there's a remarkable self-assurance about the way painters like Dod Procter and Ethel Walker committed themselves to canvas. The theme running through this show is one of pioneering women defying convention, as Woolf did, and not just in the 20th century. In 1877, Louise Jopling is looking you straight in the eye. She's from Manchester. Bet you blink first. Coincidentally, Laura Knight was born in 1877, and in the 1930s, by now a dame, she became the first woman artist elected to full members...