Executed in 1986, Bernard Buffet’s Le Pont levant, Haarlem remains a powerful embodiment of the distinctive vision that defined the final decade of his prolific forty-year career. Once hailed as France’s finest post-war painter (Connaissance des Arts, Paris, No. 36, 15 February 1955), Buffet was, by the age of twenty, acclaimed as the heir to Picasso, praised by critics, and embraced by collectors. Yet behind the fame was an artist fiercely committed to his own vision: introspective and often at odds with the shifting tastes of the art world. As a member of the anti-abstract group L’Homme Témoin (The Witness Man), Buffet remained uncompromising despite his commercial success. “I have known success. It has sometimes been thought exaggerated,” he once wrote. “The mistake made is in imagining that I have, even once… consented to betray the truth such as I feel and conceive it” (Jean Dutourd, “Bernard Buffet: A Primitive Among the Moderns”, The Atlantic, June 1958). His singular, angular style became instantly recognisable: elongated forms and a haunting emotional tone that seemed to express not just the world around him, but something deeper and more personal. According to Buffet:
“Outside of me the universe is painful, hostile, dangerous. I think that everyone must have this feeling”
The present work belongs to a deeply evocative body of paintings created during Buffet’s travels in the Netherlands. Fascinated by Dutch architecture and atmosphere, Buffet devoted a significant part of 1985 and 1986 to capturing the country’s distinctive silhouettes, such as windmills and canals. In this painting, the lifting bridge in Haarlem becomes more than a mechanical structure; rendered with such tension and clarity, it takes on a poetic, almost theatrical resonance. In another of his Dutch landscapes, Hindeloopen en Frise from 1985, Buffet depicts a Dutch canal lined with houses. Like Le Pont levant, Haarlem, the sharp lines and muted colours create a quiet yet somewhat sombre atmosphere, with reflections in the water mirroring the angular rooftops and adding to the composition’s tense stillness.
By the time the present work was painted, Buffet had long since secured his place in art history. A prodigy of twentieth-century France, he entered the École des Beaux-Arts at the age of fifteen and won the Prix de la Critique in 1948. Throughout the 1950s and beyond, he structured his practice around recurring themes, producing series on religion, death, cities, clowns, and opera. Technically, Buffet employed a meticulous process: beginning with charcoal sketches drawn directly onto the canvas, he applied translucent layers of zinc white before building up thin glazes of oil paint, often finishing with incised black contours and scratched surface textures that heightened the starkness of his compositions.
A recurring subject in Buffet’s landscape paintings, the canal and bridge in Le Pont levant, Haarlem provide a linear architectural structure perfectly suited to the artist’s strong graphic and linear style, their forms doubled in the mirrored reflections on the water in the foreground. In this depiction of the small town of Haarlem, Buffet celebrates the enduring triumph of humanity over nature and the ingenuity of Dutch engineering. The single focal point of the artist’s strict linear perspective is the lifting bridge, an important technological advancement for this longstanding trading port. Strangely devoid of people, Buffet’s landscape is stilled and muted, painted with a restricted and unmodulated colour palette: the terracotta red of tiled roofs, bright green lawns, and a sky tinged with grey.
The canal, bridge, and building motifs that frequently appear in Buffet’s landscapes provide a robust architectural framework, perfectly complementing his bold, linear style. In Le Pont levant, Haarlem, these elements are mirrored in the water’s surface, enhancing the composition’s sense of symmetry. Through his depiction of Haarlem, Buffet underscores both the resilience of human endeavour and the ingenuity of Dutch engineering. The lifting bridge, set as the focal point within his precise linear perspective, symbolises a significant technological advancement for this historic trading town. Strikingly devoid of figures, the scene is imbued with a quiet stillness, rendered in a restrained palette of terracotta rooftops, yellow façades, green trees, and a sky tinged with grey.
Today, Buffet’s work continues to attract renewed attention, including a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in Fontevraud in 2024. In Le Pont levant, Haarlem, we see Buffet’s ability to merge architectural precision with inner turbulence—painting a bridge not just in structure, but between exterior form and internal feeling.