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...
Two museums in two countries collaborate on a big exhibition, to be shown in both, and you tend to assume that, apart from a few tweaks, you'll see much the same in each city. What we weren't quite expecting when we went along to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam to see Rembrandt-Velázquez this month was to find not only a completely different approach to the show we'd seen at the Prado in Madrid during the summer, but for the most part a completely different set of paintings. The Prado exhibition bringing together the great Dutch and Spanish masters of the 17th century included some superlative pictures, but we were less than convinced by the curators' premise that, beneath the surface, there weren't really any national differences in the approach to art 400 years ago. It seemed a bit too much of an obvious pro-European political message and led to comparisons between paintings that we felt at times were rather contrived. This show in Amsterdam, by con...