Lot 267 D

Bernard Buffet was among the best-known and most successful painters of the 20th century. Hard-set black contour lines and a cool tonality define his unmistakable visual idiom. The monumentality and force with which the artist has portrayed the church of Notre Dame de la Garde, which rises above the city of Marseille as its defining landmark, in the large-format painting offered here is extraordinary. Building the scene up out of just a few broad swathes of the brush, with the paint applied extremely thickly, he invests the work with a strongly haptic and abstracted quality.
Buffet depicts the slope of “La Garde” like a black mountain chain with the characteristic silhouette of the church's bell and crossing towers rising up darkly from its peak. The stairs inserted diagonally into the picture lead the viewers' gaze upward: like a ramp, they resolutely push ahead towards the building. At the same time, however, the lemon-yellow building the artist has placed at the left edge of the picture demands as much attention as the church itself. In Buffet's vision the bright pilgrimage church, popularly known as “La Bonne Mère” and visited by numerous believers every year, is transformed into a far-off destination, whose visitors can reach it only by crossing through a mystically alienated, shadow-like cityscape.