Word: buffeting
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Eight years ago, when he won the prized French critics' award for his gruesome oils of skinned rabbits, skinny chickens and harsh still-lifes, Bernard Buffet was a gaunt and gangling youth of 20 who personified postwar misery and despair. Lacking canvas, he painted on his mother's sheets. He lived in a narrow, unheated room and went to the Louvre "not to look at the pictures but to keep warm." Last week a plumper Bernard Buffet, nattily turned out in English tweeds, rolled up to Paris' fashionable Drouant-David Gallery in his chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce...
Bravo . . . Merveilleux. The sensational Buffet opening rated front-page headlines and picture spreads in Paris newspapers, an honor usually reserved for Pablo Picasso. Since art connoisseurs had already established the artist as their choice among postwar French painters (TIME, March 21), the critics had to grub for superlatives. "The Goya of our times," wrote the critic of L'Express. "Together with Picasso, [he] ranks among the most extraordinary examples of artistic creation," said Franc-Tireur. In the gallery's red morocco-bound guest book, the great and fashionable scribbled "Bravo, Bernard" and "C'est merveilleux...
What the critics and public alike were cheering about was not so clear. Both of Buffet's shows last week were built around the single theme, "The Circus." The pictures are all the same unmixed Buffet of morbid subject and individualistic craftsmanship: a rapid, flat, angular style carried out in monotonous grey tones accentuated with blue, dull olive and bilious yellow. The canvases displayed shabby acrobats, gaunt and ugly women performers, emaciated jugglers and grim freaks (see cut). Curiously, all the figures had the same sad features-Buffet...
Misery is Buffet's trademark; if there is joy in color, it stays locked in his paintbox, and when he paints a flower, it comes out a dried-up thistle. "It is part of us, our youth of the war years, our youth which cannot escape from the climate of the war," a critic exclaimed several years ago. Buffet, who prefers to go on in glum silence, once explained: "I was eleven when war broke out. The misery of the occupation, the cold, the lack of food, all this has become everyday life to me . . . Even today...
...Litter air e issued a warning: "Under the circumstances, it will be necessary to banish the bottles and partridges from the tables, for the painter honored by the Goncourt does not like rosy cheeks, but prefers gaunt figures bent over plates garnished with fish vertebrae." The guest artist: Bernard Buffet, 27, France's most popular painter (TIME, March 21), whose portraits depict the leanest and hungriest figures since Picasso's Frugal Repast...