Manuel Cabré

Manuel Cabré Alsina was born on 25 January 1890 in Barcelona, Spain, and moved to Venezuela as a child with his father, the sculptor and teacher Angel Cabre y Magrina, who taught at the Academia de Bellas Artes de Caracas. Cabré trained under his father and, formally from 1904, at the Academia itself, studying with Antonio Herrera Toro and Mauri. He received his first academic distinction in 1908 for the landscape Paisaje de la Sabana del Blanco and took part in a 1909 student protest against the Academy's traditional teaching methods.

After a successful solo exhibition in Caracas in 1920, Cabré used the proceeds to travel to Paris, where he enrolled that year at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere and the Academie Colarossi. He remained in Paris until around 1930, absorbing Cubist and Impressionist currents before returning to Venezuela. Back in Caracas, he devoted much of his subsequent career to painting Mount Avila (Waraira Repano) in changing light and season, a body of work that made him a defining figure of Venezuelan landscape painting for the rest of the twentieth century.

Cabré received Venezuela's Premio Nacional de Pintura in 1951 and, later, the country's highest civilian honors, the Orden Andres Bello (1971) and the Orden Francisco de Miranda (1978), both first class. He died in Caracas on 26 February 1984 at the age of 94. According to a Galeria Odalys catalog of his work, and with the support of the President of the Republic, his remains lay in a posthumous homage at the Galeria de Arte Nacional before burial in the Cementerio General del Sur in Caracas.

Venezuelan art institutions have consistently framed Cabré as the definitive painter of Mount Avila and of a certain vision of old Caracas, honoring him with a series of retrospectives across his career and after his death, including shows at Sala Mendoza in 1965, the Museo de Bellas Artes in 1971, the Galeria de Arte Nacional in 1980 (Cabré el otro), the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo the same year (Obras Maestras de Manuel Cabré, 1914 to 1975), and again at the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo in 1990. No verbatim critical review in a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile, so no direct quote is included here.

Cabré's auction market is thin, concentrated mainly in Latin American art sales in New York, and closely tied to the valuation of his Mount Avila and Caracas cityscapes. His all-time auction high is Vista del Avila desde el country club (1946), which sold for USD 166,400 at Sotheby's New York on 20 May 2026, a result that surpassed the previous record of USD 148,800 set by Vista del valle de Caracas desde el Calvario at Sotheby's in 2001.

Cabré's market is small and largely regional, so individual sale results should be read in the context of a limited number of public transactions rather than as a smooth trend line. There is no published catalogue raisonne, and no current gallery or estate representation could be confirmed in available sources. Collectors should weight documented provenance, exhibition history, and museum comparanda heavily when evaluating any work offered as his.