1. Bernard Buffet's style was exclusively figurative and is often classified as Expressionist or "miserabilist".
19 Facts About Bernard Buffet
1. 2.
Bernard Buffet was born in 1928 in Paris, where he spent his childhood.
3.
Bernard Buffet was from a middle-class family with roots in Northern and Western France.
4.
Bernard Buffet was a student at the Lycee Carnot during the Nazi occupation of Paris.
5.
Bernard Buffet travelled to drawings courses in the evenings despite the curfew imposed by the Nazi authorities.
6.
Bernard Buffet then studied art at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts and worked in the studio of the painter Eugene Narbonne.
7.
Bernard Buffet met the French painter Marie-Therese Auffray and was influenced by her work.
8.
Bernard Buffet's work was characterized by thick black lines, elongated forms, and a lack of depth of field.
9.
Bernard Buffet illustrated "Les Chants de Maldoror" written by Comte de Lautreamont in 1952.
10.
Bernard Buffet was commissioned to make the portrait of Charles de Gaulle for the 1958 Time Man of the Year magazine cover.
11.
On 23 November 1973, the Bernard Buffet Museum was founded by Kiichiro Okano, a private collector in Surugadaira, Japan.
12.
Bernard Buffet created more than 8,000 paintings and many prints as well.
13.
Bernard Buffet was bisexual, and his paintings have been noted for their homoerotic themes.
14.
On 12 December 1958, Bernard Buffet married the writer and actress Annabel Schwob.
15.
Bernard Buffet died by suicide at his home in Tourtour, southern France, on 4 October 1999.
16.
Bernard Buffet was suffering from Parkinson's disease and was no longer able to work.
17.
Police said that Bernard Buffet died after putting his head in a plastic bag attached around his neck with tape.
18.
Bernard Buffet's work is particularly popular in Asia and former Soviet Union nations.
19.
In 2016, Paris's Musee d'Art Moderne held a large retrospective of his work, the first held in France since his death, though its curator acknowledged that it was a risky exhibition given Bernard Buffet's lingering reputation as the "ultimate in bad taste".