Selected works

During his second visit to the Languedoc in 1857, accompanied by the art critic Champfleury, Courbet engaged in other interests. During the latter half of June, he returned to familiar haunts by visiting the seashore, notably at Perols, not far from Palavas, where humble fishermen’s cabins stood. Courbet seemed to be fascinated by these marshy zones, still insalubrious at that time, bordered along the horizon by the remarkable mass of the Pic Saint-Loup. This time, Courbet planted his easel with his back to the sea, facing the direction of the lagoons. He was interested by the atmosphere, where water merged with the sky and where large clouds masked radiant azure. The pictorial matter of The Lagoons at Palavas, more undefined and blurred, with surprising atmospheric effects, contrasts with the better structure and balance in the painting The Sea at Palavas.
This sketch held in the musée Fabre collection, and created from life, served the artist for his production of more ambitious canvases such as Souvenir of Les Cabanes, which he painted in 1857 for Emile Mey, a friend of Alfred Bruyas, living in Mireval (Philadelphia Museum of Art collection), and undeniably the masterpiece of this series, which alone for him embodies the wilderness, the harsh grandeur and the silent melancholy of the Languedoc landscape. This time, Courbet takes the sea as his viewpoint: human activity is emphasised by the cabins, the boat and the white sail. Courbet was fascinated by the impression of liberty and space which emanates from this landscape at the edge of Montpellier and for which he avoided all the traps of the Picturesque. The viewer’s gaze expands within the space of the painting and is lost in the immensity of the water.

Pierre-Charles-Henri Bimar is well-known in the artistic circles of Montpellier, as treasurer of the Society of Friends of Arts of the city in 1851 as well as exhibitor at the Salon in Paris in 1873 and 1874.

The stays of Courbet in Montpellier in 1854 and 1857, invited by his patrons Alfred Bruyas and François Sabatier, left a deep mark. You have to imagine the apparition of exceptional talent in the perfectly academical sphere of Fine Arts in Montpellier and of a colourful, vivid character in a provincial society marked by Protestant rigorism.

The mug and the pipe shown by the painting are the usual attributes of Courbet in the caricatures published at the time, and which insist on the image of Courbet as a dirty, untidy, wily man. The image of Courbet in the upper left corner is inspired by a caricature made by Gil in l'Eclipse on July 2nd, 1870. It shows a mocking Courbet , lighting his pipe with the ribbon of the Legion of Honour, which he has just refused with a sensational letter addressed to the Minister: "Honour is neither in a title nor in a ribbon, it is in action and in the motive for action. [...] State is incompetent in matter of art. When it tries to reward, it usurps the taste of the audience.

It is probably this event that recalled Bimar the stay of Courbet and the strong friendship that bound them. A wink at this friendship, the caricatures on the wall are kept away as the joyful attributes of the painter are put forward: bottel of brandy, corkscrew, tobacco pouch, playing cards... Tribute of a young provincial amateur of art to great Gustave Courbet.

The musée Fabre is one of the few museums out of Paris to keep within its collections works by Nicolas Poussin, among which the painting Venus and Adonis he made in Italie in 1624.This painting is a unique and precious testimony to Poussin’s trip to Rome, where he saw the famous Bacchanales by Titian then on display at the Vigna Aldobrandini. An inscription on the back of the painting shows that it comes from the collection of Cassiano dal Pozzo (1588-1657), famous Roman art patron, secretary to Pope Urban VIII, and an unfailing supporter of Poussin early in his career.

The painting could have remained essentially one of the masterpieces of the Musée Fabre, if not for a decision in the 1970s to restore its canvas. At the time, Poussin experts began suggesting the possibility that there were stylistic similarities between the Montpellier painting and another one belonging to a private American collection. Indeed, the coincidences between the two paintings are undeniable: virtually identical heights, similar theme and execution, and the same provenance, the collection of Cassiano dal Pozzo.

That was when the relining operation undertaken in Montpellier in 1978 revealed on the original canvas a Latin inscription which had been cut off. All that needed to be done was to check the back of the painting in the private collection to prove whether or not it could be the left-hand part of the painting held by the Musée Fabre!
It is now widely believed that the two paintings are two parts of a single work that was cut in half between 1740 and 1771, at which time each painting began to be considered a work in and of itself and acquired a separate history.

From February 12 until May 11 2008, the Metropolitan Museum in New York shows an exhibition named Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions. It pays tribute to Poussin as a landscape painter, where Nature seen through the prism of time is endowed with a poetic quality admired by artists as different as Constable, Turner or Cézanne. The event of this exhibitions will undoubtedly be the gathering of the two paintings into one and only frame, releasing the masterpiece in its unicity, a happy ending to a remarkable story, resulting in the marvellous renaissance of a masterpiece separated for more than two centuries.

Press review of this event:

New York Times

Le Figaro

The Musée Fabre has acquired a work by François-Xavier Fabre, authenticated by Laure Pellicer, a specialist in Fabre's paintings. The picture, executed in oil on canvas (h:105 cm, w:148cm) was purchased on the open market in 2006. The picture is clearly attributable to Fabre, and was painted in Florence, in 1799, when the ambitious young artist was eager to make a name for himself as a history painter, in the wake of his celebrated master David. The painting contradicts the widely-accepted belief that Fabre did not begin working as a history painter until later in his career. In fact, Fabre executed a number of medium-sized paintings of historical or mythological subjects, similar to this one, around 1800.

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Simon Hantaï is a central figure in post-war French painting, both for his work, and his stance vis-à-vis the art world itself. Hantaï sought to highlight fundamental issues such as the central importance of the act of painting itself, the importance of time as a creative element, and the role of the artist. As such, he facilitated the long-overdue revival of a tradition that had gone badly astray. Hantaï became a pivotal figure for subsequent generations of artists, including the Supports-Surfaces group and, later, individual painters such as Bernard Piffaretti or Stéphane Bordarier. And yet his influence has been achieved, paradoxically, from a standpoint on the margins of the mainstream art world – a standpoint from which he retreated still further when he began living more or less a recluse, in 1982. Since that time, Hantaï's paintings have been considered as a "finished" body of work, revisited at times by the artist himself. Since the early 1980s, there has been growing recognition of the central importance of his ceaselessly provocative work for the history of Western painting.

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The work of Pierre Soulages underwent a significant change in 1967-68. For more than a decade, in his painting Soulages had used a palette where blue, red, walnut stain and white played an essential role alongside black, as if the substance of light were a colour in contrast to darkness. His work was done essentially on vertical formats, first in commercial dimensions, then based on the irrational relationship of the golden ratio. Finally, the paint was worked in thick layers, allowing for scrapings and transparencies from which light sprang forth.

However, during these crucial years, Soulages’ technique became more radical. He limited himself to black and white, and he used oversized horizontal formats. The colour was spread evenly, in sections of equal intensity. “In 68-70 I started a series of black and white paintings, going back to a Cistercian asceticism,” explains the artist. Pierre Soulages had done a number of paintings in walnut stain on paper in 1947, which bear some similarities to this series. But he gave a new meaning to this use, expressing his desire to isolate the work from its context. In his words “Black is the colour that most contrasts with everything that surrounds it. A black and white painting has nothing to do with its environment, which is always in colour.” This intentional asceticism generated impressive and masterly paintings. It was first of all a sheer technical success, with the painter perfectly controlling the dark flow on the immaculate white of the canvas to obtain a shape in just one motion, which would inevitably have been destroyed by any additions. It was also the challenge of monumental works, obtained with a simple ribbon of black paint, looping and growing with a dynamism unprecedented on such a colossal scale.