Bernard Buffet was born in Paris in 1928.
He showed an aptitude for drawing from an early age. He left the Lycée Carnot in 1943 and entered Eugène Narbonne's studio at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts the following year. The death of his mother in 1945 affected him deeply.
The artistic landscape in which Buffet art emerged in the years following the Liberation saw the consecration of the great historical figures of modernism, such as Matisse, Picasso, Léger and Chagall. They were showcased at art fairs and exhibitions. The 1944 Salon d'Automne, known as the "Salon de la Libération", presented a major retrospective of Picasso's work, while the following year's Salon d'Automne celebrated the work of Matisse. Jean Cassou, the first director of the Musée National d'Art Moderne, organized exhibitions of their recent work during the first years of the institution's opening, inaugurated in June 1947.
In addition to the omnipresence of these great pioneers, the art scene of the time was dominated by abstraction, particularly that of art informel, to use the term coined by Michel Tapié. In this context, Buffet, along with Paul Rebeyrolle, André Cottavoz and André Minaux, was one of the representatives of a humanist "new realism" that placed man at the center of his art, championed by Claude Roger-Marx, Pierre Descargues and Jean Bouret, famous for his stance against abstract art. In the quarrel between abstract and figurative art, these painters joined forces and exhibited at the Salon des Moins de Trente ans.[1]the Manifeste de l'Homme Témoin[2]the Salon de la Jeune Peinture[3]while other events were organized to promote and defend abstraction, such as the Salon des Réalités nouvelles created in 1946.
Quickly noticed, rewarded and supported by critics, government officials and important, influential collectors, Buffet's art was a runaway success. The speed of the twentieth century is accelerating even faster in the twenty-first.
In 1946, he exhibited a self-portrait at the Salon des Moins de Trente ans, Galerie des Beaux-Arts. The following year, at the Salon des Indépendants, his work was noticed by Pierre Descargues, a critic with the journal Arts, who offered him his first solo exhibition in December 1947, at the bookshop Les Impressions d'Art, rue des Ecoles. Raymond Cogniat, then Inspector General of Fine Arts, arranged for the State to buy Le Coq mort (Marseille, Musée Cantini) for the newly-created Musée National d'Art Moderne. Buffet is only nineteen.
In the spring of 1948, the artist presented Deux hommes dans une chambre, painted the previous year (Paris, Fonds de dotation Bernard Buffet collection) at the Prix de la Jeune Peinture, created in 1946 by Galerie Drouant-David. On this occasion, he attracted the interest of collectors Maurice Girardin and Roger Dutilleul, whose support was crucial. Emmanuel David offered him an exclusive contract with Galerie Drouant-David. In the autumn, the contract was shared with Maurice Garnier of Galerie Visconti, 35 rue de Seine. That same year, Buffet won the prestigious Prix de la Critique, sharing the prize with Bernard Lorjou, twenty years his senior, who was involved in the same movement.
His career was launched.
Buffet quickly forged a highly personal, eminently graphic style with angular lines that were immediately recognizable. He established a typology of simple, highly stylized forms, framed in black and devoid of modelling, in a space without depth. In the early years of his career, just after the war, his style was particularly austere, with little use of color. The sobriety of his early work earned him the label of "miserabilist" painter. Over time, his aesthetic varies little, were it not for the color. Depending on the period, the black lines are more or less pronounced and their thickness fluctuates. His models were Jacques-Louis David, his pupil Antoine-Jean Gros, whose work he admired in particular Bonaparte visiteant les pestiférés de Jaffa (Paris, Musée du Louvre), and Gustave Courbet. In 1955, he painted Le Sommeil after the Ornans painter.
His first exhibition at Galerie Drouant-David takes place in February 1949. At the end of the year (October 29-November 15), he took part in the second Manifeste de l'Homme Témoin in the Claude gallery. Other new participants included painters André Minaux, Robert Charazac and Jean Couty. In the same year, his career took on an international dimension. Galleries in New York, Basel, Brussels and Copenhagen show his work. Pierre Descargues publishes Bernard Buffet with Presses Littéraires de France (in 1951, he devotes a book to Paul Rebeyrolle, and again to Buffet in 1959).
In 1950, the artist met Pierre Bergé, who worked at Richard Anacréon's Originale gallery, specialized in first editions, located on rue de Seine opposite the Visconti gallery. Two years her junior, Pierre Bergé was already close to a literary milieu. The couple spent the summer of 1951 in Manosque, Haute-Provence, staying with Jean Giono. They settled in an old sheepfold in Nanse, near Reillanne. Buffet takes part in the first Salon des Peintres témoins de leur temps, created by Isis Kischka, on the theme of Work, with La Poissonnerie (Paris, Collection Fonds de Dotation Bernard Buffet), a highly structured painting whose composition is built around a play of formal rhymes between the shape of the fish and that of the grid motifs. Following in the footsteps of other artists, notably Matisse in 1953 on the theme of Sunday, Buffet repeatedly composed the cover of the event's catalog, the only salon to which he remained faithful until its last edition in 1968.
From 1951 onwards, Armand Drouant and Emmanuel David's gallery presented large formats and oil paintings; Maurice Garnier's gallery presented small formats and works on paper.[4]. In February 1952, the exhibition of La Passion du Christ (The Passion of the Christ ) - a subject in the tradition of history painting, and at odds with contemporary painting at the time - inaugurated the principle of an annual exhibition in February on a theme chosen by the artist on which he had worked the previous year. The collector Maurice Girardin commissions one hundred and twenty-five drypoints to illustrate Les Chants de Maldoror by Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautréamont, an essential figure in the Surrealist Pantheon. Buffet paints still lifes composed of bouquets of flowers, a favorite subject in the artist's iconography, and a series of Landscapes presented in February 1953. The following year's exhibition focused on Interiors. The pallid figures are depicted in front of walls covered with brightly colored wallpaper, punctuated with decorative motifs. André Warnod reports, "These paintings give off an impression of unhealthy, disquieting power."[5]. The artist buys the Manines property in Domont, near Paris.
Also in 1954, Buffet returned to large-scale painting with Horreur de la guerre, exhibited the following year at Galerie Drouant-David. My subject," he confided in the journal Arts, "has no geographical or historical limits. It encompasses all wars, of all times, of all countries. They are linked by a single feeling: the horror I feel for them."[6]. The survey organized by the magazine Connaissance des Arts in 1955 awarded him first place among the ten most important painters of the post-war period.[7]. In the same year, Roland Petit commissioned him to design the sets and costumes for his ballet La Chambre, based on an argument by Georges Simenon and music by Georges Auric, which premiered at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. He paints a whole series on the Circus. The iconic clown motif appears on this occasion. Buffet continued to use this motif until the very end of his career, in 1999. The works were presented by his two gallery owners in February 1956. He also painted Paris déserte, his first series on a city, followed by many others. The artist is the subject of a major ten-page report in Paris-Match (February 4, 1956, no. 356), illustrated with photographs showing him living in ostentatious luxury. The authors, René-Jean and Maurice Ottoni and Maurice Jarnoux, described him as an extremely prolific artist and "the most expensive of post-war painters". All this gave rise to controversy. Raymond Cogniat considers him the leader of young French painting, and devotes an entire room to him at the Venice Biennale. He illustrates La Voix Humaine, a play written by Jean Cocteau in 1929. During a visit to New York, he sketches skyscrapers, the inspiration for a series of paintings the following year.
In 1958, when Buffet was only thirty years old, the Charpentier gallery (Raymond Nacenta) organized a major retrospective, Cent tableaux 1944-1958, which was an outstanding success, with over eight thousand visitors flocking to the opening on January 16. On this occasion, he met Pierre Sorlier and Georges Sagourin from Fernand Mourlot's studio, who became his assistants for his lithographic work.
On January 20, Françoise Sagan's ballet Le Rendez-vous manqué premiered at the Petit Opéra de Monte-Carlo, directed by Roger Vadim, with music by Michel Magne and sets and costumes by Bernard Buffet, with only Buffet's contribution spared by the critics. Like Buffet, Sagan enjoyed a rapid rise to fame at an early age with his first novel, Bonjour tristesse, published by Julliard in 1954. In January 1958, he and Pierre Bergé attended Yves Saint-Laurent's first fashion show at Dior.
His annual exhibition at Galerie David et Garnier focuses on the theme of "Joan of Arc". Color is vibrant, freed from its straitjacket of austerity. This series, executed in 1957, marks a turning point in Buffet's work. A moment of pictorial crisis. The artist had reached an impasse; inspiration had left him, or at least had changed register. The historical context was no longer the same, the tragedy and suffering of the war and the immediate post-war period less present, less vivid. With the introduction of vivid color, Buffet's painting changed in tone, and some of the public turned away from it.
Buffet and Pierre Bergé separate that same year. During the summer, the artist met Annabel Schwob de Lure, a friend of Françoise Sagan and Juliette Gréco and a Saint-Germain-des-Prés muse. They married in December 1958. Annabel became his muse. In his early representations, his face eschews the sharp, angular lines characteristic of Buffet's style. He maintains soft lines and curves until the following year's Annabel in a Bathing Suit, when Buffet's sharp line takes over his face. In February, he exhibited in New York. The works focused on the motif of buildings, summed up in a network of lines forming a grid, and are of extreme geometric rigidity.
The following year, he painted Monumental Birds. Presented in February 1960 at the David et Garnier gallery, they caused a scandal. His "large yellow, red, green and blue birds look out for strange naked women".[8] in equivocal postures. The bright color is surprisingly present, and its material is thicker, which is new. While Buffet remained faithful to his strong, angular black line, from the Birds series onwards he developed a more painterly language of color and material, analogous to the practice of certain abstract artists such as Jean Fautrier. He renews his collaboration with Roland Petit's Ballets company, designing the sets and costumes for Patron by Marcel Aymé, with music by Guy Béart.
The Sixties were the cradle of Conceptual Art and Minimalism, counterpoises to Abstract Expressionism and Informal Art. Young artists were also marked by a return to the real, to the object, driven by Pop Art in the United States and Nouveau Réalisme in France, against a backdrop of economic development and a society in the throes of change, particularly in terms of consumerism. Buffet remained faithful to his aesthetic and to the typology of his subjects, which were presented in cycles.
In 1961, he returned to narrative history painting with a series on the life of Christ, intended for the chapel of his Château l'Arc estate, acquired in 1956. The series was exhibited the following February at the David et Garnier gallery. While the drawing is hard and harsh, and particularly strong, the colors, dominated by warm tones of red, yellow and orange, create a golden light. The paintings are part of the Vatican Museum collections. The following year, he designed the sets and costumes for Georges Bizet's Carmen, directed by Louis Ducreux, for the Opéra de Marseille. His first collection of lithographs, Album Paris, with calligraphy of poems from Charles Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal, was published the same year by Alain Mazo et Cie, Paris. This was also the period of Venise (1962) and Bernard Buffet's Museum (1963), featuring his famous monumental butterflies and dragonflies. These were followed by Écorchés, frightful bloody figures on flamboyant yellow or orange backgrounds. They made up the February 1965 exhibition at Galerie David et Garnier. The paintings' immense formats, like those of large-scale painting(Tête d'écorché de dos (Paris, Fonds de Dotation Bernard Buffet collection), for example, measures almost two meters by two meters), and the monumental nature of the subjects, depicted in close-up, increase their effect on the viewer tenfold. Meanwhile, Buffet illustrated Sagan's diary, Toxique, published by Julliard, 1964, with Indian ink drawings. These were the years of the thick-rimmed toreros, doubtless inspired by Carmen, followed in 1966 by Annabel as a matador in a series on La Corrida, exhibited in February 1967 at Galerie David et Garnier.
By 1966, Buffet had fallen to eighteenth place in the list of the most important artists of the time, once again published by the magazine Connaissance des Arts. His reputation had been declining since the end of the fifties, when the Charpentier gallery retrospective was the high point of his career. He was roundly criticized. He was criticized for not renewing his style, for taking advantage of a system, for being a commercial painter. "People hate me. For fifteen years, they've been saying that I'm finished.[9].
In 1965, Raymond Cogniat wrote of the artist's exhibition at the Galerie David et Garnier. "Bernard Buffet once again invites us, very punctually, to this annual meeting which, he writes, appears more and more like an individual act with no connection to the other manifestations of artistic life."[10].
Until the end of his career, light subjects such as bouquets of flowers, clowns, landscapes, cities (Paris, New York, St. Tropez, Venice, St. Petersburg), or more occasionally churches, castles, boats, etc., alternated with large-scale narrative frescoes in the tradition of Buffet's beloved great painting, These alternate with grand narrative frescoes in the tradition of Buffet's beloved large-scale painting, from Dante's Inferno (1976) to The French Revolution (1977), Cervantes' Don Quixote (1988), Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1989), Homer's Odyssey (1993).
In 1981, he travelled to Japan to visit the Bernard Buffet Museum, created in Surugadaira by a passionate collector, Kiichiro Okano, and inaugurated on November 25, 1973. He produced some twenty paintings, presented the following year at the Maurice Garnier gallery. Buffet fell in love with the country. He loved its modern civilization and the great refinement of its traditions. It was one of his sources of inspiration: Oiseaux d'Hokkaïdo (1981), Sumo, Kabuki (1987). He subsequently returned to the Land of the Rising Sun twice, in 1988 for the inauguration of the extension to the museum dedicated to him, and again in 1996 for the inauguration of the annex housing his etchings and lithographs. The following year, Buffet felt the first signs of Parkinson's disease. Unable to paint any longer, he ended his life on October 14, 1999 at his property in La Baume, near Tourtour in the Haut-Var region of France. His last series, on the theme of Death, was exhibited in Maurice Garnier's gallery in February of the following year, as is customary. The works of recent years feature a much freer brushwork, detached from detail in a stylized style, as in Squelettes travestis, 1998 (Paris, Fonds de Dotation Bernard Buffet collection), or certain paintings of La Mort, which are surprisingly close to the aesthetic of Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Buffet received several prestigious distinctions during his lifetime: he was made an Officer of the Légion d'Honneur (1993), and a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, painting section (1974).
In 2009, Maurice Garnier and his wife Ida created the Fonds de Dotation Bernard Buffet, with a view to eventually creating a museum dedicated to his work. Three years later, the couple made a donation to the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, which organized a retrospective of Buffet's work in 2016.
Anne Coron, Doctor in History of Contemporary Art
Gallery of the Institute
[1] The Salon des Moins de Trente ans was reintroduced in 1941 as a reaction against abstract art.
[2] The first Manifeste de l'Homme Témoin, initiated by painter Bernard Lorjou and Jean Bouret, presented works by Bernard Lorjou, his wife Yvonne Mottet, and Ruche painters Paul Rebeyrolle, Michel Thompson and Michel de Gallard at the Galerie du Bac from June 21 to July 21, 1948.
[3] The Salon de la Jeune Peinture was founded in 1949 by Denys Chevalier and Pierre Descargues, who had initiated the Salon de la Jeune Sculpture a year earlier.
[4] In 1956 Emmanuel David and Maurice Garnier formed a partnership (Galerie David et Garnier, avenue Matignon). In 1968 Emmanuel David set up his own gallery; Galerie David et Garnier became Galerie Maurice Garnier.
[5] André Warnod, Le Figaro, February 8 1954.
[6] Bernard Buffet, Arts, February 2, 1955.
[7] Connaissance des Arts, no. 36, February 15, 1955. Other artists included Antoni Clavé, Bernard Lorjou, Alfred Manessier, Nicolas de Staël, Edouard Pignon, Jean Carzou, André Minaux, André Marchand and Jean Bazaine.
[8] Elle, February 19, 1960.
[9] Michèle Manceaux, "Bernard Buffet", L'Express, February 13, 1964.
[10] Raymond Cogniat, "Bernard Buffet le solitaire", Le Figaro, February 11, 1965.