TAB Event - Bernard Buffet

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At Seiji Togo Memorial Sompo Japan Museum of Art
Media: Painting, Drawing

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Bernard Buffet, a realist painter active since World War II in France, was born in Paris in 1928. He started painting aged 10, and at 15 entered the Ecole des Beaux Arts but his mother’s death forced him to quit the school. After 1945, he went to the Musée du Louvre everyday and received the influence from such artists as Rembrandt, Delacroix, and Courbet. In 1948, at 19, he received a Critic Award (Prix de la Critique) and became a leading force of representational paintings which were in opposition to the abstract “informel” paintings in fashion at the time.
Buffet’s painting style made up of strong and keen contour lines was critically acclaimed by a large audience who appreciated his raw depiction of human solitude, isolation and absurdity in the midst of the devastated apres-guerre French society. After 1960, he started using colorful hues in addition to his characteristic monotone ones and made mighty landscape paintings similar to those of Courbet and Vlaminck. After 1980, he continued to apply ironic touches to his well-established unique painting style. Then, feeling his own death near, he even touched upon the theme of death.
The exhibition consists of three parts: portrait, landscape, and still-life paintings. All works are from the Bernard Buffet Museum located in Nagaizumi-cho, Shizuoka prefecture in Japan. 70 selected works ranging from “Pere et fils (Father and Son)” and “La cuisine (Kitchen)” painted in 1945, the year he started his career as a painter, to “Vive les morts” in 1998, painted a year before his death are shown to retrace his great accomplishments.

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