The painter as poser

Bernard Buffet was no one’s idea of a great painter. Except, that is, Pierre Bergé and Nick Foulkes. Bergé was Buffet’s original backer and boyfriend, later performing identical roles for Yves Saint-Laurent, turning the sensitive designer into a global ‘luxury brand’ and turning himself into one of France’s richest men with pistonnage to spare. Foulkes is the accomplished writer on style who, in this new book, aims to rehabilitate an artistic reputation which he feels has been dissed by the narrow prejudices of the art-historical establishment.

To a degree, this is true. Because Buffet’s scratchy and splashy paintings are (mawkishly) ‘figurative’, he never satisfied the criteria of ‘relevance’ and ‘progress’ that dominated art history and art criticism in the second half of the last century. He was mocked by Paris intellos, whose leader, the Napoleonic minister of culture, André Malraux, was committed to promoting abstraction. As a counter-attack, Buffet’s supporters invented a rivalry with the much older Picasso when, more accurately, Picasso’s attitude to the younger man was majestically disdainful. Rather like Britain’s special relationship with the US, this rivalry was felt on only one side.

But the Buffet story is fascinating. At a commercial level, his success was enormous. And his pictures satisfied a certain need: a Buffet image of, say, a depressed pêcheur recalls a moment in time as precisely as a tangerine-coloured Arne Jacobsen chair or a Renault Floride. What we have in The Invention of the Modern Mega-Artist is a case-study of the conflict between high and low culture, the uneasy bargain between popular acceptance and critical acclaim. Buffet never pleased serious critics, but today we are more inclusive. Categories and frontiers of art history are being reconsidered, so Buffet deserves reappraisal. But it’s a tough job: everyone agrees that he was a faiseur (a poser) who caricatured the idea of a modern painter on a stage managed by the French media.

If the conventional view of Buffet was that his pictures of weeping clowns are ham-fisted, coarse and sentimental, executed with modest skill, the very definition of low-brow, a shallow art requiring no interpretation or effort by the viewer, then it is up to his new champion to make an alternative case.