Bernard Buffett (1928-1999)

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Born in Paris in 1928, he entered the fashionable Ecole des Beaux Arts in 1944 but worked mostly by himself. He rapidly developed an immediately recognizable and highly mannered style.

In sharp and spiky linear terms and with dismal grays and neutral tones, he depicted emaciated figures and distorted still lifes which seemed to express the existential alienation and spiritual solitude of the post-war generation. It was upon this power to capture a mood that his great popularity depended.

Later, overwhelmed by commissions and success, his work became more stylized and more decorative, losing in great measure its initial impact.

Edward Lucie-Smith has said: "Bernard Buffet had a spectacular success in the 1940s and 1950s with schematic figurative paintings which were literal interpretations of the gloomier and more superficial aspects of Sartre's existentialist philosophy. Buffet's interest really lies in the fact that quite a large section of the public received him so eagerly as an acceptable representative of modern art."