Gloomy Prodigy

Paris, surfeited with aging masters, has taken a 22-year-old painter to its bosom. He is a shadowy figure, shy, ascetic and wire-thin, named Bernard Buffet. Two years ago Buffet's first show won the coveted annual Prix de la Critique; his latest exhibition in Paris was a near sell-out (at prices which averaged one-third the going rate for a Braque or a Picasso). Last week Buffet's first show in Manhattan was doing fine, too.

In Paris, Buffet's work was described as "conscientious and cruel," but "thin and dingy" would do just as well. Buffet's "nudes" were bony yellow or grey creatures hovering, paralyzed, in huge, dirt-colored squares. In his "still lifes," cast-iron pears, shriveled, lozenge-shaped lemons, tortured cutlery and inedible fish writhed on wrinkled tablecloths.

Not even his ardent admirers could describe Buffet as a master of line or color. The most graceful lines in his work were those of his big, angular signature, which made an eye-catching spider track across the top of each picture.

The positive qualities of Buffet's art were abstract ones, having nothing to do with the pinched and gloomy nature of his subject matter. The spiny silhouettes that dominated his canvases were arranged with deceptive casualness, each in its own flat area, but they struck the eye, separately and together, with maximum force. And though the mood of his pictures was invariably grey as the ring around a bathtub, it was grey of a distinctive shade, instantly recognizable as his own.

Born in Montmartre, Buffet started painting at ten. At 15 he left the stuffy Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts to paint on his own. He moved into a tiny room in a brother's Montmartre apartment, made a habit of doing his work there between dinnertime and dawn. Married and divorced within a year, he has few friends and no hobbies. Music baffles him, whether jazz or a symphony. Says Buffet: "Je n'entends rien."

Buffet has left Paris only once in his life, for an outing on the Riviera which he found "banal." Rich enough now to live as he pleases, he remains at his brother's apartment and follows his old schedule of nightwork, avoiding other artists and studiously resisting the influence of his elders. Picasso, he admits, "is a great painter, but he means nothing to me."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.