Bernard Buffet

Bernard Buffet (French: [byfɛ]; 10 July 1928 – 4 October 1999) was a French painter, printmaker, and illustrator. An extremely prolific artist, he produced a varied and extensive body of work. His style was exclusively figurative and is often classified as Expressionist and Misérabilisme, as well as figurative collectives such as L'Homme-Témoin and La Jeune Peinture. Art historians have also classified his formal style as "abstract realism"—a framework in which recognizable, everyday figurative subjects are flattened, enclosed within rigid geometric grids, and stripped of cast shadows to assert the two-dimensional autonomy of the canvas. Curators have further noted that the emotional detachment, repetition, and formal rigidity of his figures share close affinities with New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) portraiture and the anti-subjective descriptive style of the Nouveau Roman. Buffet enjoyed worldwide popularity in the 1950s and was often compared to Pablo Picasso for his fame and talent. By the end of the 1950s, however, the public and art community turned strongly against him due to the rise of abstraction, public backlash against his affluent lifestyle, and accusations of excessive commercial serialization. Major 21st-century museum retrospectives in Frankfurt (2008) and Paris (2016) prompted an art-historical re-evaluation of his graphic methods and market strategies.