Art Of The Day Weekly

Unpopular Buffet is back

PARIS - At the age of 20, pennyless, he painted on the pants and sheets his grandmother gave him. At the age of 30, he was wealthy, the owner of a castle and of a Rolls Royce, and was nicknamed the "painter with the golden arm" by a German newspaper. When he died in 1999, he was - with Soulages - , the best known French artist in the world and an idol in Japan, where a whole museum is dedicated to his work. Only one country snobbed him, France. French museums only bought one of his works, in 1950. The time for revenge (post-mortem) has finally come with this large retrospective that opens the doors of a major institution. One can learn all about his life in high society: his long relationship with Pierre Bergé; his friendship with Jean Giono and Jean Cocteau; his marriage with Annabel, the rival of Juliette Greco at Saint-Germain-des-Prés; his exhibitions at Maurice Garnier's where large crowds came every month of February. But one also learns about the scandals for obscenity (Vacances en Vaucluse), his struggles (his huge triptyc in Horreurs de la guerre), the doubts and his touching end: affected by Parkinson's disease, he produced a series on death and then committed suicide, leaving behind as his last testimony a movie done by his son. The great number of works presented cannot completely erase the feeling of ease, of kitsch - like the series on automobiles, or the one on Jules Verne - but is also allows us to separate Buffet from his eternal harsh trait, that looks like an engraving on metal, and which he ended by carrying like a scar. His works after the war - views of workshops, portraits, ascetic men in maids' rooms - kept their power. One detail says it all: even after they broke up, Pierre Bergé kept, for over fifty years, the paintings from that period.
• Bernard Buffet, rétrospective at the musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, from 14 October 2016 to 26 February 2017.

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