"In Buffet's line, Paris turns austere and angular — a city stripped of comfort."
Born in Paris in 1928 and marked as a teenager by the hardships of the Occupation, Bernard Buffet (1928–1999) became, while barely in his twenties, one of the most celebrated figurative painters of postwar France. Trained at the École des Beaux-Arts, he forged an instantly recognisable style built on thick black outlines, elongated silhouettes and a deliberate refusal of sentimentality, associated with Expressionism and the postwar "miserabilist" current. Paris runs through his work as a recurring, almost obsessive motif: its bridges, rooftops and monuments rendered with the same angular severity as his portraits and still lifes. In Buffet's vision the city sheds its picture-postcard charm to become a stark, melancholic silhouette — as unmistakable as his own signature line.