Bernard Buffet. An intimate portrait

Exhibition catalogue Bernard Buffet. Intimement, présented at the Musée de Montmartre, Paris (20 october 2016 - 6 march 2017).

Throughout his life, Bernard Buffet revisited the places and themes of his childhood: his beloved Montmartre, from the Place Pigalle, where he was born in 1928, to the Batignolles district, where he grew up, and his house at 20 Rue Cortot, in which he lived for ten years and which is near the Musée de Montmartre; the circus, which he tackled in a series of works between 1955 and the end of the 1990s, with the zany parades of the Cirque Médrano; and the interiors and still lifes, in which he deconstructed space and for which he invented a silent weightlessness by reducing the motifs to their most refined and incisive forms.

The painter’s main personal interests and the recurrent themes in his work provide the framework for the original itinerary of the exhibition devoted to this ‘polymorphic’ and multifaceted genius. ‘Bernard Buffet: An Intimate Portrait’ focuses, in particular, on his fusional connection with the world of literature and the theatre, his commitment and hard work in the Lacourière and Frélaut atelier in Montmartre, his love for Annabel, his wife and muse, and the solitary walks that inspired his landscapes.