Description

Bernard Buffet charcoal and color crayon drawing

‘Le Papillon’ – dated 1963 on reverse

Bernard Buffet was renowned for austere figurative paintings infused with social critique.

Featuring thick, spiky black outlines and a restrained palette, Buffet’s landscapes, portraits, and still lifes were angular and confrontational—a stylistic choice that reflected the alienation and anxiety of his post-war generation. Art history, death, sexuality, politics, and religion were frequent themes throughout his oeuvre.

Very early on, Bernard Buffet regularly represented insects and made them a recurring theme in his paintings/drawings. The butterfly held a special place there from the end of the 1950s. Always presented with outstretched wings, as in lepidopterophilia, the insect is a pretext for painting colors, bright or more monochrome. Very ribbed at first, the wings gradually become flat spaces intended to let the artist satisfy his thirst for color. All on monochromatic backgrounds, or almost, in complementary chromaticity.

Artifact on sale is a small but beautiful original charcoal and color pencil drawing of a butterfly with a monochrome beige background – drawn on vellum.

Signed in large pencil on top, in the middle

Dated 1963 on the reverse side

Size : 29 x 21 cm

In absolute mint condition

Info on Bernard Buffet :

Bernard Buffet (French: 10 July 1928 – 4 October 1999) was a French painter, printmaker, and sculptor. He produced a varied and extensive body of work. His style was exclusively figurative. The artist enjoyed worldwide popularity early in his career but was shunned by art pundits later on.

Today, there is a renewed interest in Bernard Buffet’s oeuvre. His works can be seen in the collections of the world’s leading museums, including the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, the Tate, and the Museum of Modern Art.

Bernard Buffet was a student at the Lycée Carnot during the Nazi occupation of Paris. He travelled to drawings courses in the evenings despite the curfew imposed by the Nazi authorities. He then studied art at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (National School of the Fine Arts) and worked in the studio of the painter Eugène Narbonne. Among his classmates were Maurice Boitel and Louis Vuillermoz. He met the French painter Marie-Thérèse Auffray and was influenced by her work. Sustained by the picture-dealer Maurice Garnier, Buffet produced religious pieces, landscapes, portraits and still-lifes. In 1946, he had his first painting shown, a self-portrait, at the Salon des Moins de Trente Ans at the Galerie Beaux-Arts. He had at least one major exhibition every year. Buffet illustrated “Les Chants de Maldoror” written by Comte de Lautréamont in 1952. In 1955, he was awarded the first prize by the magazine Connaissance des Arts, which named the ten best post-war artists. In 1958, at the age of 30, the first retrospective of his work was held at the Galerie Charpentier.

On 12 December 1958, Buffet married the writer and actress Annabel Schwob. They had three children. Daughter Virginie was born in 1962; daughter Danielle, in 1963; and son Nicolas, in 1973. Bernard Buffet was named “Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur” in 1973.

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

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

Buffet died by suicide at his home in Tourtour, southern France, on 4 October 1999. He was suffering from Parkinson’s disease and was no longer able to work. Police said that Buffet died around 4 p.m after putting his head in a plastic bag attached around his neck with tape.