Only a few month after the publication of Nicolas Foulkes´comprehensive and well researched study Bernard Buffet: The Invention of the Modern Mega-artist  a retrospective exhibition of this most hated and best forgotten popular artist of the 20th century opens in the French capital, this former lion´s den of canonisation and condemnation.

Alongside his favourite subjects – self-portraits, still lifes – the exhibition in the  Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris presents the other themes Buffet worked through in his annual exhibitions at Galerie Maurice Garnier: religion (The Passion of Christ), literature (Dante’s Inferno, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea) and allegory (The Birds, The Mad Women). The emphasis is on his enduring concern with history painting and the history of painting.

Bernard Buffet: Apes (Exhibition view Gallery Ursula Walbröl, 2001)

“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. (. ..)  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 exhibition in the Musée d’art moderne runs until 26 February 2017

Bernard Buffet: Le combat avec le requin (From the cycle “Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea,” photo: Gallery Ursula Walbröl, 2003)