Curiosidades

His style was exclusively figurative and is often classified as Expressionist or "miserabilist".

Picasso further worsened Buffet's reputation by publicly denigrating his work, and Buffet also attracted the enmity of novelist André Malraux, the powerful French Minister of Culture. Finally, Buffet's critical reputation was also affected by his tremendous and sometimes indiscriminate output. In the 1990s, he claimed he had completed a painting a day for more than four decades. In the words of one art historian, many of these works were "unequivocally bad".

Buffet died by suicide at his home in Tourtour, southern France. He was suffering from Parkinson's disease and was no longer able to work. Police said that Buffet died after putting his head in a plastic bag attached around his neck with tape.

Buffet created more than 8,000 paintings and many prints as well.

On 23 November 1973, the Bernard Buffet Museum was founded by Kiichiro Okano, a private collector in Surugadaira, Japan.

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 changing artistic tastes, Buffet's lavish lifestyle, and his extremely prolific output.

Despite his reduced reputation, Bernard Buffet was named "Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur" in 1973.

By the age of 21, Buffet was already considered one of the greatest stars of the art world, frequently compared to Pablo Picasso. A 1958 article in The New York Times called him one of the "Fabulous Five" cultural figures of post-war France (the other four were Brigitte Bardot, Françoise Sagan, Roger Vadim, and Yves Saint Laurent).

Buffet was bisexual, and his paintings have been noted for their homoerotic themes.

His mother often took him to the Louvre Museum, where he became familiar with the works of Realist painters, such as Gustave Courbet. This is likely to have influenced his style. In 1955, he painted a work that paid tribute to Courbet's Le Sommeil.

As a painter, Buffet produced religious pieces, landscapes, portraits and still-lifes. Influenced by Francis Gruber, he often painted "Miserabilist" scenes of despair, including scenes of poverty, but he also portrayed subjects as varied as ashtrays, clowns, and table lamps.

At the request of the French postal administration in 1978, he designed a stamp depicting the Institut et le Pont des Arts - on this occasion the Post Museum arranged a retrospective of his works.

In 1948, he won his first major prize, the Prix de Critique, sharing it with fellow Expressionist Bernard Lorjou.

His work was characterized by thick black lines, elongated forms, and a lack of depth of field.

An extremely prolific painter, he had at least one major exhibition every year. By the age 26, it was said that he had completed more paintings than Pierre-Auguste Renoir's lifetime output.

In 1958, at the age of 30, the first retrospective of his work was held at the Galerie Charpentier.

Bernard Buffet was a French painter, printmaker, and sculptor. An extremely prolific artist, he produced a varied and extensive body of work.

He studied art at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (National School of the Fine Arts)[2] and worked in the studio of the painter Eugène Narbonne.

In 1955, he was awarded the first prize by the magazine Connaissance des Arts, which named the ten best post-war artists.

By the end of the 1950s, both the public and the art world had turned against Buffet. His lavish lifestyle--including a Rolls Royce with a chauffeur and a private castle in Provence--made him seem out of touch with the still-struggling economy of post-war France, which he had memorably portrayed in his early paintings.

On 12 December 1958, Buffet married the writer and actress Annabel Schwob. They adopted three children.

A 1956 magazine photograph of Buffet being helped into his car by the chauffeur was a particular turning point in the public's views of him. Another magazine published photographs of Buffet's lifestyle--large castle, expensive furniture, well-fed dogs--alongside the miserable figures of his paintings to implicitly accuse him of hypocrisy.

In the 21st century, there has been a renewed spike in interest in the work of Buffet. His work is particularly popular in Asia and former Soviet Union nations.

In 1948, gallerist Maurice Garnier began showing Buffet's work, and by 1977, his gallery was devoted solely to Buffet. Corresponding with this renewed interest, some of Buffet's work also saw rising appraisals in the early 21st century. In 2015, his painting Le Cri du Clown (1970) sold for 3.15 million Hong Kong dollars ($410,000 USD) in an auction in Hong Kong. That same year, Christie's auction house in London sold Buffet's Les Clowns Musiciens, le Saxophoniste (1991) for £1,022,500, which set the record for the highest-selling work by the artist.

Industrialist Pierre Bergé was Buffet's live-in lover for eight years from 1950 to 1958, recalling later that the two were "never apart for a single day." In 1958, Bergé left Buffet for Yves Saint Laurent.