After the Sunburst

Modern French art is still dominated by the names of the aging masters whose talents made the early decades of this century a brilliant sunburst in art history. But what about the new generation that has grown up in the afterglow? To find out who they are, Critic Georges Charensol asked key artists, museum directors, collectors and critics to name the top painters who have come into their own since the liberation of France. The list of the top ten,* published in the current Connaissance des Arts, adds up to not much more than a workmanlike junior varsity of artists who are still struggling with the lessons and problems handed down to them by the older generation.

"Buffet (helas!)," was the way one French painter marked his ballot. By an almost 2-to-1 vote, his colleagues agreed. Like it or not, the hottest thing in contemporary French art is the stark, spiny, thinly painted work of 26-year-old Bernard Buffet (TIME, Feb. 18, 1952). Painter Buffet was almost made to order to catch the imagination of postwar France, then wrapped up in the gloomy cult of existentialism. His subject matter was skinned rabbits, sticklike nudes, grim, bare interiors. Even his inarticulateness suited the times. Said Buffet, in one of his rare statements about his own work: "I don't like to discuss the subject . . . mainly because I have nothing to say. I paint like a carpenter who saws wood, like a blacksmith who hammers iron." Buffet won the prestigious Critics Award when he was only 20, and his reputation has risen ever since. Today he turns out oils, painted in depressing greys, black, drab greens and dun brown at a rate even a house painter would envy. As rapidly as he paints them, collectors snap them up, at prices ranging from $2,000 to $10,000 each.

Others of the top ten:

ANTONI CLAVE, 41, a Spaniard who is currently France's leading ballet stage designer. Clave's handsome studies in rich greens, blacks and deep violets of dolls, stage props, studio bric-a-brac are largely decorative, inspired by hints thrown out earlier by Bonnard and Picasso.

BERNARD LORJOU, 46, an unabashed realist, whose heavy-handed oils make up in impact what they lack in grace (TIME, Nov. 6, 1950). To critics who say that his plunging horses, beheaded bulls and heavily laden tables are symbols borrowed from Picasso, Lorjou angrily replies that his inspiration comes direct from El Greco, Velasquez and Goya.

ALFRED MANESSIER, 43, sometime architect from Picardy, an abstractionist (he calls his painting "supra-rational") who uses colors that glow like Rouault's. Like Rouault, Manessier underwent a religious crisis which he resolved in a brief retreat to a Trappist monastery. Manessier's subsequent work has often had a kind of vaulted Gothic mysticism.

EDOUARD PIGNON, 50, a rugged son of a Pas-de-Calais miner, who likes to build up massive forms overflowing with a healthy sensuality. Pignon believes: "It is a question of massing, of warping the surface, and not of hollowing it."

NICOLAS DE STAEL, 41, born in St. Petersburg, son of a Czarist cavalry officer, who paints in heavy slabs of color on the canvas (TIME, March 30, 1953), which he maintains is not abstraction: "I am trying to give as much as possible of myself with a maximum of discipline."

JEAN CARZOU, 48, a self-taught painter who works with delicate, fuzzy line to produce evocative paintings with attenuated, surrealist overtones.

ANDRE MINAUX, 31, whose work represents one significant trend in French painting: the return to realism and 19th century masters like Courbet and Delacroix. The lessons of cubism and fauve color, thinks Minaux, have by now become the unconscious inheritance automatically guiding and correcting the artist's eye and intelligence, thus leaving painters free to turn to traditional subjects, such as Minaux's French peasants harvesting.

ANDRE MARCHAND, 48, who has one of France's most vibrant palettes (TIME, April 14, 1952), varies his colors from the deep violets and greens of the Burgundy forest to glowing reds and yellows, the "solar world" of sun-drenched Provence.

JEAN BAZAINE, 50, a sculptor turned painter whose abstract stained-glass windows at Assy and Audincourt are among the best modern glass work in France.

* Thirty years ago, a similar poll conducted by Critic Charensol produced an all-star team: Matisse, Maillol, Derain, Segonzac, Picasso, Utrillo, Rouault, Bonnard, Braque and Vlaminck.

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