Bernard Buffet rose as quickly as only a few artists. He was in the right place at the right time and seemed gifted with almost inexhaustible talent. At the height of his fame, he alienated himself from the critics and the public and went his own way, which led him to the brink of obscurity.
(...) Continue readingBernard Buffet – The steep rise of the gifted
Bernard Buffet was born in Paris on 10 July 1928. His early awakened interest in the fine arts led him initially to the Lycée Carnot and then to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris where he studied art history from 1943 to 1945. Buffet quickly found his place in the avant-garde; with other artists, he founded the group ‘L’homme-témoin’ and was quickly placed under contract with the art dealer Maurice Girandin through the mediation of Georges Rouault and Maurice Utrillo. Encouraged by this success, Bernard Buffet developed and refined his personal, unmistakable style in the years that followed, in which his models Rembrandt, van Gogh, Courbet, Géricault and Cross were reflected.
Golden post-war years for Bernard Buffet
Bernard Buffet’s greatest period was the post-war era, in which the decimated world around him wished to rise from the ruins, and saw a beacon and guiding light in his art. In proximity to existentialism, his paintings discovered a seed of life in the midst of the dirt and grime, which they presented to their viewers as a faint glimmer of hope and a silent promise of imminent renewal. Life in death, movement in arrest, memory in obscurity were Buffet’s motifs, who did not forget the beauty of the world which he tried to capture with enchanting compositions. Buffet was celebrated as the true successor of Picasso, and collectors paid prices for works by Bernard Buffet which came close to those of the Spanish master.
Buffet’s work also displayed elements of Japanism which brought him great popularity in Japan; the Japanese patron Kiichiro Okano even dedicated a museum to Buffet in 1973 with an extensive collection of over 2000 works.
Perseverance instead of self-renewal
What the grey post-war world experienced as a vital rush of images was increasingly met with incomprehension by the critics. Buffet was accused of verging on kitsch, they wanted to ban him from galleries and museums and relegate him to the lounges of the little people. Bernard Buffet did not surrender to these accusations, but instead resisted bitterly: while on the one hand he portrayed politicians for widely read magazines such as “Spiegel”, “Stern” and “Time Magazine”, on the other he picked up the ever-louder accusations of cliché, and pushed this very line to the extreme: grotesque, screaming depictions based on motifs of Dante, Jules Verne and the artist’s own fantasies appeared. Buffet created a monstrous panopticon, a legion of absurdities that were supposed to fight against his critics and bring him new attention. It didn’t help – towards the end of his life, Buffet was as close to obscurity as he had been to immortality decades earlier.
Buffet maintained his life-long unwavering consistency until the end: When his progressive Parkinson’s disease made it impossible for him to work as an artist, Bernard Buffet took his own life on 4 October 1999. Gradually, his unique work is being rediscovered by the art world and in 2017 he was honoured with a comprehensive retrospective in Paris.
Bernard Buffet - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
