Bernard Buffet

Galerie Taménaga, Paris
Sale: Est-Ouest Auctions, Hong Kong, 25th May 2012, lot 29
Purchased at the above sale by the present owner

Yann le Pichon, Bernard Buffet, 1943-61, Switzerland, 1986, no. 214, illustrated in colour p. 250

The canvas is not lined. There do not appear to be any signs of retouching visible under UV light examination There are some fine lines of craquelure in places, predominately to the extreme edges, and associated to the undulation of the canvas, all of which appears to be stable. There is also an area of craquelure towards the centre of the extreme left edge, which appears to relate to a light impact. There is an approx. 0.5cm line of paint loss to the upper left corner of the red curtain. There is a small dent to the canvas to the centre of the right edge, associated to some flecks of paint loss. This work is in overall very good condition.
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Nature morte au grand-duc, painted in 1953, is an extraordinary example of the artist's important early period, when he first developed his highly distinctive aesthetic that helped Buffet attract an international audience. In 1955 - just two years after the present work was painted - Buffet was named by a panel of over 100 critics as the most impressive young painter in the world. By 1958, at the age of only 30, he had received his first retrospective at the Galerie Charpentier, and in the same year The New York Times named Buffet one of ‘France’s Fabulous Young Five’ alongside peers that included Yves Saint-Laurent and Brigitte Bardot. An impressive resumé for such a young artist, but one that was not unfounded: commentators and collectors alike recognised a compelling gravitas in the young Buffet. His style, at times sombre, harsh and dark, was felt to mirror the post-war mood much more than other emerging movements.

Pierre Descargues, an early friend and champion of Buffet’s, spoke of this gravitas: ‘The fashionable word at the moment is testimony, thrown about rather nonsensically. This young painter, Bernard Buffet, allows us, through his work to use it anew and without smiling, because his painting possesses that rare tone of purity and truth that is often sought in vain. A tone that is bitter and hard, expressing … all the imperturbably crucified life of an exposed world that is our own’ (quoted in N. Adamson, 'The Last Big Artist in Paris, Bernard Buffet', in Art Journal of the National Gallery of Victoria, no. 44, 2004, n.p.).

The present work was painted during a time of solitude and investigation for the young Buffet. Between 1951 and 1954, he took a studio in Nanse, near Reillanne (fig. 1). Later, his wife Annabel explained this attraction to rural surroundings: ‘Born in Paris, and brought up by a loving mother in a small apartment, he could escape the concrete and stone only during those brief breaks from school…As soon as he was old enough to choose, he fled the crowds, the noise, the agitation of the city that suffocated him’ (Bernard Buffet: Paris (exhibition catalogue), Galerie Tamenaga, New York, 1989, n.p.). Aside from objects one might expect to make up a still life, this is one of a few paintings in the 1950s to feature one of the stuffed owls that the artist was collecting at the time. With his trademark hard black outline he ensures an ordered, morbid and still pose, very much in the spirit of Descargue’s observation above. In a series of interviews conducted by Georges Charbonnier between 1959 and 1960 with artists on the distinction between realism and abstraction, Buffet stood alone in his unqualified acceptance of being labelled as a realist painter. When asked how he defined his task, Buffet stated: ‘For me, the notion of realism corresponds to the recognition of objects, of nature. Realist painting for me is concreteness … realism consists in the representation of things (quoted in N. Adamson, op.cit., n.p.).