An Artist Must Eat

Eight years ago, when he won the prized French critics' award for his gruesome oils of skinned rabbits, skinny chickens and harsh still-lifes, Bernard Buffet was a gaunt and gangling youth of 20 who personified postwar misery and despair. Lacking canvas, he painted on his mother's sheets. He lived in a narrow, unheated room and went to the Louvre "not to look at the pictures but to keep warm." Last week a plumper Bernard Buffet, nattily turned out in English tweeds, rolled up to Paris' fashionable Drouant-David Gallery in his chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce. He stepped out to the cheers of admirers and the triumph of a spectacular one-man show. Even before the formal opening, all of Buffet's 26 oils had sold for fat prices. Across the Seine, a Left Bank gallery sold out its stock of 30 Buffet watercolors. Bernard Buffet's take for the week: $113,000.

Bravo . . . Merveilleux. The sensational Buffet opening rated front-page headlines and picture spreads in Paris newspapers, an honor usually reserved for Pablo Picasso. Since art connoisseurs had already established the artist as their choice among postwar French painters (TIME, March 21), the critics had to grub for superlatives. "The Goya of our times," wrote the critic of L'Express. "Together with Picasso, [he] ranks among the most extraordinary examples of artistic creation," said Franc-Tireur. In the gallery's red morocco-bound guest book, the great and fashionable scribbled "Bravo, Bernard" and "C'est merveilleux."

What the critics and public alike were cheering about was not so clear. Both of Buffet's shows last week were built around the single theme, "The Circus." The pictures are all the same unmixed Buffet of morbid subject and individualistic craftsmanship: a rapid, flat, angular style carried out in monotonous grey tones accentuated with blue, dull olive and bilious yellow. The canvases displayed shabby acrobats, gaunt and ugly women performers, emaciated jugglers and grim freaks (see cut). Curiously, all the figures had the same sad features--Buffet's own.

Misery is Buffet's trademark; if there is joy in color, it stays locked in his paintbox, and when he paints a flower, it comes out a dried-up thistle. "It is part of us, our youth of the war years, our youth which cannot escape from the climate of the war," a critic exclaimed several years ago. Buffet, who prefers to go on in glum silence, once explained: "I was eleven when war broke out. The misery of the occupation, the cold, the lack of food, all this has become everyday life to me . . . Even today I am still amazed that it is possible for me to enter a shop and buy whatever I like."

Jaguar & Monkey. The fact seems to be that Buffet found his style early and stuck with it. Good fortune, in return, stayed with Buffet. His canvases have soared from $50 to a top $10,000 for the largest oils, prices exceeded today only by such giants as Picasso, Braque and Rouault. He gets what he wants, whatever the cost. "You must feed your best horse plenty of oats if you want him to run fast," explained Gallery Owner Emanuel David.

Oats for Buffet include a farmhouse near Aix-en-Provence, a Jaguar, a fat Buick convertible and the Rolls-Royce (4,500,000 francs), a new, twelve-room country house outside Paris, a personal chef, three dogs, two ducks and a pet monkey--but no wife or girl friends.

Buffet sticks to a prodigious routine, turns out 150 oils a year--a pace that caused one dissenting critic to complain that "this young millionaire, whose lack of culture is equaled only by his cynicism, has painted more pictures at the age of 28 than August Renoir produced in his entire lifetime." To such critics Buffet last week took the unusual measure of delivering a reply. In an open letter to the Communist art weekly, Les Lettres Franc,aises, he said: "Van Gogh and Gauguin never had enough to eat. Soutine and Gruber died without having attained the fame and fortune they merited. But art has had its vengeance since: Picasso is not only famous all over the world. He is also a billionaire . . . I am accused of making too much money. Look at Meissonier; he earned much more than I do today and he produced bad art . . . There was a time when an artist was not regarded as a curious animal which should live on a diet and eat stale bread."

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