A prolific painter, Bernard Buffet lived a life which makes for a phenomenal story of changing times and fortune Born in Paris in 1928, Bernard Buffet grew up as a taciturn young boy whose formative teenage years were marked by the gloom of World War II and an unstable household where his father was mostly absent His academic performance at school was also not up-to the mark, and the only thing that piqued his interest was drawing As a young boy he attended drawing classes at Place des Vosges, and his visits to the Louvre museum with his mother also harnessed his artistic pursuit Bernard Buffet was only 15 years old when he gained admission at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts This was a defining period in the rapid development of Bernard Buffet’s art, during which he experimented with different styles, including townscapes, still-lifes, and portraits bearing exaggerated and concerted facial features

The death of his mother in 1945 had a devastating impact on the artist As a seventeen-year-old standing at the threshold of adulthood, he drifted through life with this profound melancholy, reflecting on his canvases Bernard Buffet’s austere visual narrative rendered in a sombre colour scheme of dark shades was also seen as a metaphor for existential dread in post-war Paris Featuring dark scenes of the crucifixion, war, misery, and violence, his dark compositions were executed with a total lack of depth which heightened the impact of the imagery and bestowed a brooding sense of misery, even evident in his still-life works

The first solo exhibition of Bernard Buffet’s work was held at a Parisian bookshop in 1947 The following year he found representation at Jeune Peinture and Galerie Drouant-David During this time, he also met people like Maurice Girardin, Maurice Garnier, and Roger Dutilleul, who would become devoted collectors of his works By the mid-1950s, Bernard Buffet had been accepted as a prodigious artist His unstoppable popula