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| Bernard Buffet, French (1928-1999) |
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“Painting—we do not talk about it, we do not analyze it, we feel it.”
– Bernard Buffet
French artist Bernard Buffet was born in Paris July 10, 1928. Buffet began his artistic studies at The Ecole des Beaux Arts in 1943. Highly precocious, Buffet had his first one man exhibition in 1947 in Paris at the Galerie des Impressions d’Art in Paris. At the age of twenty, Bernard Buffet was awarded the Prix de la Critique.
Working exclusively with Galerie Drouant-David and art dealer Maurice Garnier, Bernard Buffet had already established a distinctive style. Enjoying enormous success in the 1950’s, Bernard Buffet’s artwork was characterized by elongated, angular forms with dark outlines, somber colors and an overall mood if loneliness and despair. Buffet used a wide range of subjects including religious scenes, landscapes, still-lifes and portraits. Buffet’s work seemed to express the existential alienation and spiritual solitude of the post-war generation.
In 1955, the magazine Connaissance des Arts named Buffet as one of the 10 best post-war artists. In 1958, at the age of thirty, the first Bernard Buffet retrospective was held at the Galerie Charpentier.
Bernard Buffet has had numerous solo exhibitions, and Buffet’s artwork can be found in the permanent collections of prestigious museums and institutions world-wide. The Surugadaira Museum in Japan is dedicated to collecting Buffet works, boasting nearly 1,000 of Buffet’s etchings, lithographs, sculptures, and paintings.
Bernard Buffet embraced printmaking, and proved to be an exceptional engraver and lithographer. In a 1992 poll for the French magazine ‘Beaux-Arts’, French people preferred Bernard Buffet to Vermeer or Andy Warhol.
After suffering from Parkinson’s disease, and despondent over being unable to create works of art, Bernard Buffet committed suicide in 1999.
Select Museum Collections:
Tate Gallery, London
Museum of Modern Art, New York
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, San Francisco
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.
National Gallery of Victoria, Australia
ARTAX, Dusseldorf
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