Bernard Buffet (1928-1999) French, Etching. Depicts a canal in the "Miserabilist" style. Signed and dated '56 top middle. 

Frame: 21 3/4 x 31 5/8 in.

Sight: 13 1/2 x 22 in.

#3159 . 

Bernard Buffet was born in 1928 in Paris, where he spent most of his childhood. He was from a middle-class family with roots in Northern and Western France, and his mother often took him to the Louvre Museum, where he became familiar with the works of Realist painters such as Gustave Courbet. Bernard Buffet was a student at the Lycée Carnot during the Nazi occupation of Paris, as well as studying at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. He worked in the studio of the painter Eugène Narbonne and met Marie-Thérèse Auffray, especially influenced by her work. Buffet’s mother died from breast cancer in 1945, which remained a source of traumatic melancholy throughout his life, inspiring many of the stark, dark images he created. Buffet produced religious pieces, landscapes, portraits and still-lifes. Influenced by Francis Gruber, he often painted so-called “Miserabilist” scenes of despair, including scenes of poverty and Holocaust victims, with nearly all the work in his adult life characterized by thick black lines, elongated forms, and a lack of depth of field. In 1946, he had his first painting shown, a self-portrait, at the Salon des Moins de Trente Ans at the Galerie Beaux-Arts. An extremely prolific painter, he had at least one major exhibition every year for the next three decades. By the age of 21, Buffet was already considered one of the greatest stars of the European art world, frequently compared to Pablo Picasso. By the age 26, it was said that he had completed more paintings than Pierre-Auguste Renoir had in his entire lifetime, and in 1958 an article in The New York Times called him one of the “Fabulous Five” cultural figures of post-war France (the other four being Brigitte Bardot, Françoise Sagan, Roger Vadim, and Yves Saint Laurent). That same year he was commissioned to make the portrait of Charles de Gaulle for the Time Man of the Year magazine cover. In the mid 1960s the public and the art world began to lose interest in him, as his lavish lifestyle made him seem out of touch with the still-struggling economy of post-war France. Picasso further worsened Buffet’s reputation by publicly denigrating his work, and Buffet also attracted the enmity of novelist André Malraux, the powerful French Minister of Culture. Despite his reduced reputation, Buffet was named “Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur” in 1973, the same year the Bernard Buffet Museum was founded by Kiichiro Okano, a private collector, in Surugadaira, Japan. In the 1990s, he claimed he had completed a painting a day for more than four decades, but in the words of one art historian, many of these later works were “unequivocally bad,” “poorly executed,” and “clearly rushed.” It is estimated that he created more than 8,000 works in total. Buffet was bisexual, and his paintings have been noted for their homoerotic themes. Industrialist Pierre Bergé was Buffet’s live-in lover for eight years from 1950 to 1958, before leaving him for Yves Saint Laurent. That same year Buffet married the writer and actress Annabel Schwob, and they adopted three children, but his life was plagued by depression and he began to succumb to Parkinson’s as early as the late 1980s. Buffet died by suicide at his palatial home in Tourtour, southern France, on October 4th, 1999. In the 21st Century his work found new appreciation, particularly in Asia and former Soviet Union nations, and shifting tastes have helped reevaluate his impact on the artistic world as a French celebrity and post-Expressionist pioneer.