Alexandre Cabanel - Musée Fabre
From 10 July, the Fabre Museum in Montpellier, the birth place of Alexandre Cabanel, presents the first retrospective dedicated to the painter's work. Cabanel was a regular visitor to the court of Napoleon III and was admired by his contemporaries throughout the western world for his portraits and his repertoire of grand and spectacular subjects painted in the Academic style, such as Phaedra, Cleopatra or Othello. In 1863, the comparison between his Birth of Venus and Manet's Luncheon on the Grass (Déjeuner sur l'herbe) led to one of fiercest artistic controversies over the Nude in the 19th century. Aristide Maillol, Bastien Lepage and Eugène Carrière were among the young artists who regularly visited Cabanel's studio, and his teachings left their mark on a number of his students who in their own way, provided a new perception of the rendering of Beauty.
