The most famous artist you’ve never heard of
THe suicide of a 71-year- old Frenchman, who calmly placed a plastic bag over his head and taped it tight, did not cause much of a stir, in Britain anyway, when it occurred in October 1999. Yet the life he was ending so miserably had been an extraordinary one. Bernard Buffet, not remotely a household name today, had, in the Fifties and Sixties, been one of the world’s most famous and collectable artists.
He was astonishingly prolific, turning out barren landscapes, cityscapes, still lifes, religious scenes and alarmingly graphic nudes by the truckload, but his prodigious output didn’t devalue his brand. in 1956 london, a mediumsized Buffet fetched £5,000 — more than twice the average price of a house.
He lived like a king in a chateau with a chauffeurdriven Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith, and reached the zenith of his fame in 1958, the year the New York Times dubbed him and four other bright young things ‘ France’s Fabulous Five’, symbolising the country’s post-war revival.
The others were actress Brigitte Bardot, designer Yves Saint laurent, film director Roger vadim and novelist Francoise Sagan. That same year, thousands upon thousands of people heaved to get in to the first afternoon of a show of Buffet’s paintings in Paris. The streets were gridlocked with traffic, the city gripped by what Nicholas Foulkes, in this riveting biography, describes as ‘Buffetmania’.
Buffetmania crossed the Channel, too. in Britain 50 years ago, Buffet’s spiky painting of a sad clown was a familiar adornment in middleclass homes. And it crossed the Atlantic. in Fifties Hollywood, not to have a Buffet on the wall was, for some, akin to not having a convertible in the drive.
Alfred Hitchcock, Kirk Douglas and John Huston all owned Buffets. When Humphrey Bogart and his young wife lauren Bacall visited Paris for the first time, they came home with a Buffet. it was still on the wall of Bacall’s apartment in New York’s Dakota building when she died in 2014.
Yet Buffet in his heyday was much more than a
sought-after artist. Introspective, gaunt, handsome and bisexual, his private life was a source of insatiable public fascination in France.
In terms of fame, he and his beautiful wife Annabel Schwob were a celebrity couple not unlike the Beckhams today, a comparison Foulkes invites with the line: ‘Bending it like Buffet was a serious business’.
The reference is not to what Buffet could do with a football, rather to his alcoholic benders. He was an epic drinker, matched by his socialite wife whose ‘years in the nightclubs of Paris had built up an almost Olympic level of tolerance’.
Buffet even invented a cocktail, the Rencontre au sommet, or summit meeting, which consisted of one part Cognac, one part whisky, one part Cointreau, and two parts Champagne.
His neediness extended far beyond booze, however. The first major love affair of his life was with the budding businessman Pierre Berge, for whom he left his wife, having married her impulsively and largely because of her resemblance to his beloved dead mother.
Berge, in turn, left him for Yves Saint Laurent, yet for eight years the two men were so inseparable that, according to Berge, they never once lunched or dined apart. Buffet’s relationship with Annabel was similarly intense, and he painted her repeatedly, to the approval of one of his patrons — a Parisian gallery owner who, having seen her naked in St Tropez, recalled that ‘hers was the most beautiful woman’s body I’ve ever seen in my life’. But even with fame, fortune and a stunning wife, Buffet’s life was not as gilded as it looked. The popular demand for his art was not matched by critical acclaim, and increasingly he was shunned by the snobbish French art establishment. Two men in particular loathed everything he stood for. One was France’s influential Culture Minister, Andre Malraux, who effectively put a stop to Buffet’s work being exhibited in the country’s museums.
The other was the Minister’s friend, Pablo Picasso, who was dismissive of Buffet’s talent, hated hearing it compared with his own and could not contain his fury when his own two children leapt up, at a Cannes restaurant, to ask Buffet for his autograph.
By the mid-Sixties, Buffet’s star had fallen as dramatically as it once soared. But he continued to work, and his art continued to sell, above all in Japan, where, in the late Seventies and Eighties, his paintings were treated as they once had been by the Hollywood elite — as symbols of status and wealth.
So when he killed himself in 1999, it was not because his paintings had fallen out of fashion, but because, racked with Parkinson’s disease, he could no longer produce them.
The second half of his life had yielded plenty of fulfilment and three adopted children, and yet, had he done the terrible deed 40 years earlier, he would have gone to his grave not semiforgotten, but as a superstar.