Bernard Buffet
France's most famous young painter at twenty, and then unfashionable for forty years.
Bernard Buffet was born in Paris in 1928 and won the Prix de la Critique at twenty, becoming for a decade the most celebrated painter in France — thin, spiky black outlines, drained colour, gaunt figures and empty rooms, an art that read as the exact temperature of the post-war years. He was voted one of the ten best post-war artists in a 1955 poll, ahead of most of his generation. Then taste turned decisively against him, and it stayed turned for the rest of his life. He painted to the end, in annual thematic series, and took his own life in 1999 when Parkinson's disease made it impossible to hold a brush.
Buffet worked at enormous volume and to an annual pattern, so date and subject series matter more than usual: the late 1940s and 1950s work sits far above the later decades, and within any year the still lifes, clowns, landscapes and Japanese subjects are not equally sought. The signature and year on the face are almost always present. There is a large printed output of lithographs and drypoints. The market has strengthened substantially in Asia, and the Musee Bernard Buffet in Japan holds a significant part of the record.
If you own a work by Bernard Buffet
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