The headline new exhibition in London in October is Francis Bacon: Human Presence at the National Portrait Gallery, which assembles more than 55 works to examine Bacon’s far-from-traditional approach to portraiture from the 1950s onwards. Among the sitters: Lucian Freud. The show runs from October 10 to January 19.
Those in search of something less visceral might prefer to Discover Constable & The Hay Wain at the National Gallery. This is the latest in a series of relatively small free shows at the gallery looking at a single picture in depth; we’ve found them very enjoyable so far. Constable’s painting is now seen as presenting a traditional view of the countryside; when it was made, though, it was regarded as rather radical. On from October 17 to February 2.
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More than five years ago, we went to the Nunnery Gallery in Bow in east London to see an exhibition of paintings of the local area by Doreen Fletcher. Those modern cityscapes could be seen as following on from the creations in the 1920s and 1930s of the East London Group of artists, one of whose mentors was Walter Sickert. From October 4, the Nunnery Gallery will be celebrating both the East London Group and their present-day urban successors, Fletcher among them. In the Footsteps of the East London Group can be seen until December 22, and entry is free.
One of our favourite exhibition spaces is the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes, and their latest show is a retrospective of the work of Vanessa Bell, pioneering modernist and one of the leading members of the Bloomsbury Group. Vanessa Bell: A World of Form and Colour will be the largest ever exhibition devoted to the artist, and it’s on from October 19 to February 23.
We’re half-way to Birmingham now, so let’s get back on the train and head to the Barber Institute for Scent and the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites. The show aims to demonstrate how smell was a key motif in the work of the Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic movements, with 19th-century ideas about scent and smell differing quite markedly from those of today. There’s free admission, and the exhibition runs from October 11 to January 26.
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We recently very much enjoyed the Leonora Carrington exhibition at Newlands House Gallery in Petworth. And as that show closes, another one opens, at Firstsite in Colchester, featuring her work, that of her artist friends, and artefacts from cultures that inspired her painting and sculpture. Leonora Carrington: Avatars & Alliances runs from October 26 to February 23, and yet again, entry is free.
As painter and patron, Gustave Caillebotte was a major figure in the Impressionist movement, though his style was far less impressionistic than many of the artists whose work he supported with his purchases. A new exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris looks at his portrayal of male figures — workers, sportsmen, and even the odd nude. Running from October 8 to January 19, Caillebotte: Painting Men will travel on to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Art Institute of Chicago in 2025.
There’s a big Pop Art show at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, centred on Tom Wesselmann (with around 150 works), but also including Richard Hamilton, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol as well as older and more recent artists who share an affinity with the genre, such as Meret Oppenheim, Ai Weiwei and Yayoi Kusama. Pop Forever: Tom Wesselmann &… can be seen from October 17 to February 24.
Our third Paris selection this month may suit those looking for something a little more subtle and subdued than Pop: Trompe l’oeil from 1520 to the Present Day at the Musée Marmottan Monet. More than 80 works will be on display, largely from less than household names, but that of Jean-Etienne Liotard does stand out. Also opening on October 17, this one closes on March 2.
Rembrandt’s pupil Samuel van Hoogstraten is one of the best known creators of trompe l’oeil, and the great Dutch Golden Age master wasn’t averse to a bit of visual trickery himself, as you can discover in Rembrandt–Hoogstraten: Colour and Illusion. Featuring many international loans, this is the big autumn exhibition at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, from October 8 to January 12. Starting in February, the Rembrandt House in Amsterdam will be presenting what looks to be the van Hoogstraten section of this show under the title of The Illusionist.
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Also in Vienna, from October 3 to January 19, there’s Gauguin: Unexpected at the Kunstforum. More than 80 works on loan from major international museums and private collections follow Paul Gauguin’s career from his beginnings as a Post-Impressionist, all the way to the South Seas. This is the first Gauguin retrospective in Austria since 1960.
Last October, a show about flowers in art at the Musée des impressionnismes in Giverny aptly called Flower Power brightened up our autumn. That exhibition started off in a different form at the Kunsthalle in Munich, and the latest version opens on October 12 at the Bucerius Kunst Forum in Hamburg. Flowers Forever: Flowers in Art and Culture is on till January 19, and the artists featured range widely from Edward Burne-Jones to Ai Weiwei and Kehinde Wiley.
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Who’s Belgium’s second most-famous Surrealist? Surely Paul Delvaux, pretty much a contemporary of René Magritte and known for his paintings of trains and naked women, sometimes in the same pictures. In this centenary year of the Surrealist Manifesto, The Worlds of Paul Delvaux opens at La Boverie in Liège on October 4, running until March 16.
And for our last opening this month, a somewhat out-of-the ordinary theme in a definitely out-of-the-way location. Gothic Modern: From Darkness to Light at the Ateneum in Helsinki looks at how artists in the 19th and 20th centuries drew inspiration from medieval and Renaissance art to explore topics such as birth, death and suffering. Lucas Cranach the Elder, Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch are among the painters in an exhibition on from October 4 to January 26, before it moves to the National Museum in Oslo and the Albertina in Vienna.
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Last chance to see….
You’ve got until October 5 to see Peggy Guggenheim: Petersfield to Palazzo at Petersfield Museum & Art Gallery, the story of how one of the world’s most famous collectors got her taste for modern art while living in a cottage on the Hampshire-Sussex border.
October 20 is the last day for The Shape of Things: Still Life in Britain at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, a hugely enjoyable and varied exhibition with many highlights.
And staying within the same small geographical area, Leonora Carrington: Rebel Visionary, a show that changed our view of Britain’s most prominent Surrealist, ends at Newlands House in Petworth on October 26.
Images
John Constable (1776-1837), The Hay Wain, 1821. © The National Gallery, London
John Everett Millais (1829-1896), The Blind Girl, 1856, Birmingham Museums Trust on behalf of Birmingham City Council
Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606-1669), Girl in a Picture Frame, 1641, Royal Castle, Warsaw. © The Royal Castle in Warsaw — Museum. Photo: Andrzej Ring, Lech Sandzewicz
Kehinde Wiley (b. 1977), Portrait of a Florentine Nobleman III, 2019, courtesy of the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London. Photo: © Sammlung Vilsmeier-Linhares, Munich
Edvard Munch (1863-1944), By the Death-Bed, 1896, Finnish National Gallery/Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki. Photo: Finnish National Gallery/Aleks Talve