The Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de
Paris
14 October 2016 - 26 February 2017
The Musée
d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris is organising a retrospective of the work of
Bernard Buffet (1928 – 1999), one of the most famous French painters of the
20th century, but also one of the most contentious . In a choice of a hundred paintings
this exhibition takes a fresh look at an oeuvre wh ch in fact remains little known
to the public at large .
The Musée d’Art Moderne being the only public museum
with a large Buffet collection – thanks to the substantial Girardin bequest in
1953 and the Ida and Maurice Garnier donation in 2012 – it seemed appropriate to
proceed with a project dating back to a contact initiated with the artist's long
-time dealer Maurice Garnier (1920– 2014) some ten years ago, but delayed by the
ongoing controversy surrounding the oeuvre. The passing of time brings greater objectivity,
however, and many artists , art professionals and collectors are beginning to
reconsider a body of work that has become slightly less perplexing.
Given
Buffet's prolific output, this overview is necessarily highly selective ; nonetheless
the exhibition will reveal the unsuspected quality and variety of what will perhaps
live on as one of the most fascinating and most influential painterly oeuvres
of the last century. The chronologically structured retrospective opens with Buffet's beginnings, when his work was triggering a new awareness of a wide range
of artistic forms and objects. Thus it covers the postwar years and their
debate about reali sm, figuration and abstraction; and overall it highlights the
paradox of an artist who was drawing on history painting in the context of the disappearance
of the subject, and whose life was a blend of artistic austerity and financial ease,
of public success and a rejection of the art world.
Alongside his favourite
subjects – self -portraits, still lifes – the exhibition will present the other
themes he worked through in his annual exhibitions at Galerie Garnier:
religion
( The Passion of Christ ),
literature
(Dante's Inferno ,
Twenty Thousand Leagues
under the Sea )
and allegory
( The Birds ).
The emphasis will be
on his enduring concern with history painting
(the Horror of War series)
and the
history of painting
( The Sleepers, after Courbet ),
and on his last,
spectacular series, Death ,
with its references to the memento mori of medieval
times.
Generously backed up with documentary material, the retrospective will also
offer an insight into the mechanisms behind Buffet's fame. The catalogue provides
new studies of the artist by French and international historians, as well as articles
by writers and critics of the time and interviews with Buffet's artist
contemporaries.
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