Bernard Buffet melun
Bernard BUFFET
"Melun, la Seine, Automne" Oil on canvas 89x130 cm Signed top right "Bernard BUFFET"
About the artist
Bernard Buffet was born on July 10, 1928 in the 9th arrondissement of Paris. Child of Charles and Blanche Buffet, he comes from a cultivated middle-class background, going against the legend that he lived in extreme poverty. His two grandfathers are soldiers, one is passionate about drawing, and his father runs a mirror factory. He was raised in the 17th arrondissement of Paris at no 29 rue des Batignolles where he began to paint and draw at the age of ten. Very young, he rubbed shoulders with the artist Marie-Thérèse Auffray who taught him painting and became his mentor4. Expelled from the Lycée Carnot in 1939, in 1942 he followed evening classes in the city of Paris on the Place des Vosges, where Paul Darbefeuille introduced him to drawing. He won the entrance examination to the National School of Fine Arts in December 1943 at the age of fifteen, spending two years in the studio of the painter Eugène Narbonne where he was already considered very gifted. He made friends there with the painters Maurice Boitel and Louis Vuillermoz. In 1945, he left to work alone in the maid's room in the family apartment. On vacation in Saint-Cast-le-Guildo (Brittany), he painted beach pictures. In the summer of 1945, his mother suffered from headaches and died two months later of a brain tumor, which Bernard Buffet would never recover from. In 1946, he exhibited his first painting, a self-portrait, at the Salon des less than 30 ans at the Galerie des Beaux-Arts.
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