GERMAN

Bernard Buffet

Maler und Graphiker

born: 10.7.1928   Paris
died:  4.10.1999  Tourtour/South-France

The surprising artistic success of Buffet probably only compares with that  f Pablo Picasso.  As late as 1947, he displayed his works at his first Exhibition in Paris while he was still unknown.  One year later, the 20-year old painter received the desirable "Prize of the Critics" and, with this, his astronomical rise began. Buffet´s stylistic paintings, most likely falling into the Neorealism category, manifest the merciless misery of life. "Why use symbols of joy in a socially messed up world, a world, like that which set the scene in Orson Welles' "Third Man"?  If there seems to be no hope, if there is no straw to clutch at, then there remains nothing else than "destroying this world with its own weapons", wrote J. Bouret about Buffet.

Since the beginning, Buffet's style is unchanged: painfully thin, often enormously ugly figures or sparse still-lives which seem to be composed in a cobweb of lines.

Buffet is the son of a former miner.  Already, at the age of ten he painted with such fervour that he was advised to leave school and make his way as a painter.  As a result of which Buffet visited evening classes and studied drawing in 1943.  In 1944, he began studying at the Ecole of the Beaux-Arts and by 1945 he was an independent painter.