Bernard Buffet – Hotel de la Poste

Description

Bernard Buffet, Hotel de la Poste is a drypoint on Arches paper. Published by ‘Editions Lacouriere Galerie Maurice Garnier’and printed by Atelier Lacouriere et Frelaut. From the signed and numbered edition of 100. Rheims 51.

Hotel de la Poste, is defined by “dry” straight lines revealing the shape of buildings and bodies. His works show elongated, emaciated figures and structures and lend a feeling of despair and loneliness. He shows Paris itself, traditionally portrayed as lively and colorful, in a hard and lifeless manner. While predecessors like Renior and Caillebotte used rain and stippled light to give beauty to each Parisian world they depicted, Buffet shows us the grace in the city’s structure, relying on the importance of drawing, the basis of all great work. This fundamental and visually heavy approach actually shows us the underlying beauty of such a popular and visually pleasing city.

Embodying Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialism and Albert Camus’s Absurdism, Bernard Buffet’s painting conveyed the anxiety that permeated France during the Nazi occupation and came to dominate the post-war figurative art scene. A member of a group called L’Homme Témoin (The Witness) along with Bernard Lorjout and André Minaux, Buffet developed a realist style infused with social criticism, featuring a restrained palette and black outlines. He is best known for his grim “Horror of War” series and myriad streetscapes and interior scenes populated by angular, emotionless figures. Self-portraits, religious scenes, still lifes also figure among his oeuvre, which extends to lithography, engraving, and sculpture. While Buffet continued to enjoy success as a commercial artist until a debilitating illness prompted him to commit suicide, his work fell out of favor among critics in the 1960s and remains relatively unknown.