Bernard Buffet (; 10 July 1928 – 4 October 1999) was a French painter, printmaker, and sculptor. An extremely prolific artist, he produced a varied and extensive body of work. His style was exclusively figurative and is often classified as Expressionist or "miserabilist".
Buffet enjoyed worldwide popularity in the 1950s and was often compared to Pablo Picasso for his fame and talent. By the end of the 1950s, however, the public and art community turned strongly against him due to changing artistic tastes, Buffet's lavish lifestyle, and his extremely prolific output. The 21st century saw a renewed interest in his oeuvre.
Early life
Bernard Buffet was born in 1928 in Paris, where he spent his childhood. He was from a middle-class family with roots in Northern and Western France. His mother often took him to the Louvre Museum, where he became familiar with the works of Realist painters, such as Gustave Courbet. This is likely to have influenced his style. In 1955, he painted a work that paid tribute to Courbet's Le Sommeil.
Bernard Buffet was a student at the Lycée Carnot during the Nazi occupation of Paris. He travelled to drawings courses in the evenings despite the curfew imposed by the Nazi authorities. He then studied art at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (National School of the Fine Arts) and worked in the studio of the painter Eugène Narbonne. Among his classmates were Maurice Boitel and Louis Vuillermoz. He met the French painter Marie-Thérèse Auffray and was influenced by her work.
Buffet's mother, Blanche, died from breast cancer in 1945. Seventeen-year-old Buffet was devastated. Losing his mother at an early age remained a source of melancholy throughout his life.
Rise to fame
As a painter, Buffet produced religious pieces, landscapes, portraits and still-lifes. Influenced by Francis Gruber, he often painted "Miserabilist" scenes of despair, including scenes of poverty and Holocaust victims, but he also portrayed subjects as varied as ashtrays, clowns, and table lamps. His work was 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. In 1948, he won his first major prize, the Prix de Critique, sharing it with fellow Expressionist Bernard Lorjou.
An extremely prolific painter, he had at least one major exhibition every year. By the age 26, it was said that he had completed more paintings than Pierre-Auguste Renoir's lifetime output. In 1948, gallerist Maurice Garnier began showing Buffet's work, and by 1977, his gallery was devoted solely to Buffet.
By the age of 21, Buffet was already considered one of the greatest stars of the art world, frequently compared to Pablo Picasso. A 1958 article in The New York Times called him one of the "Fabulous Five" cultural figures of post-war France (the other four were Brigitte Bardot, Françoise Sagan, Roger Vadim, and Yves Saint Laurent).
Buffet illustrated "Les Chants de Maldoror" written by Comte de Lautréamont in 1952. In 1955, he was awarded the first prize by the magazine Connaissance des Arts, which named the ten best post-war artists. In 1958, at the age of 30, the first retrospective of his work was held at the Galerie Charpentier.
Later career
However, by the end of the 1950s, both the public and the art world had turned against Buffet. His lavish lifestyle--including a Rolls Royce with a chauffeur and a private castle in Provence--made him seem out of touch with the still-struggling economy of post-war France, which he had memorably portrayed in his early paintings. A 1956 magazine photograph of Buffet being helped into his car by the chauffeur was a particular turning point in the public's views of him. Another magazine published photographs of Buffet's lifestyle--large castle, expensive furniture, well-fed dogs--alongside the miserable figures of his paintings to implicitly accuse him of hypocrisy.
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. Finally, Buffet's critical reputation was also affected by his tremendous and sometimes indiscriminate output. In the 1990s, he claimed he had completed a painting a day for more than four decades. In the words of one art historian, many of these works were "unequivocally bad".
Despite his reduced reputation, Bernard Buffet was named "Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur" in 1973. On 23 November 1973, the Bernard Buffet Museum was founded by Kiichiro Okano, a private collector in Surugadaira, Japan.