Bernard Buffet 1982–1999

This catalog is a Volume 3 work of a French artist Bernard Buffet. Mr. Buffet was born in Paris, started drawing around age 10 and studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Highly precocious, he had his first solo show in Paris in 1947 and in 1948, at age 20, was awarded the Prix de la Critique jointly with an older painter, Bernard Lorjou. By then he had developed a distinctive style of elongated, spiky forms, somber colors, flattened spaces and an overall mood of loneliness and despair. In signature black outlines that suggested illustrational versions of Giacometti's tenuous scaffolds, Mr. Buffet reduced reality to the point of abstraction.