Buffet Bernard

French artist, creator of a distinctive style that combined modernism with salon art. Born in Paris on July 10, 1928 in the family of a factory director. He studied at evening courses at the School of Drawing and at the School of Fine Arts. He became famous for his melancholic, dull, almost monochrome portraits, genres and still lifes - with angular, dreary, aloof figures of elongated proportions in deliberately uncomfortable, meager interiors, or equally “dreary” objects on the kitchen table. He was close to neorealist tendencies, but criticism more often attributed him to miserabilism. Buffet became a key figure in this movement. Later, the master’s works blossomed with brighter, but still sparse, colorful accents, increasingly growing to the size of large panels. Salon effects are invariably combined in these pieces with the artist’s “signature” style, which is as tough and graphically “prickly” as his characteristic large signature. He often turned to engraving (dry point and other techniques), created a number of illustrative cycles, including texts by Lautréamont, J. Cocteau and F. Sagan. Since 1964, he translated individual motifs from his paintings into sculpture. In 1973, the artist’s personal museum was opened in Surugadaira (Japan).