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.