BUFFET Bernard

Bernard BUFFET (1928–1999)

Title: Château en Bretagne
Date: 1970s (Original poster)
Technique: Poster printed by Draeger
Dimensions: 54 × 80 cm (without margins)

Description and Critical Analysis

In Château en Bretagne, Bernard Buffet presents a landscape that is both majestic and tinged with melancholy. The composition is dominated by a monumental tree whose stark, leafless branches form a powerful graphic structure, framing a castle with slender towers. The luminous walls of the château stand in sharp contrast to the weighty, dramatic sky above.

True to his expressionist style, Buffet structures the scene with incisive black outlines that heighten the dramatic tension. His autumnal palette—dominated by ochres, browns, and golds—translates Brittany into an inner, almost symbolic landscape. More than a depiction of place, the scene becomes a meditation on permanence and fragility, where nature and architecture are entwined in a solemn yet poetic dialogue.

The mirrored reflection of the château in the water, the interplay of shadows, and the rigor of form all elevate this image into a visual meditation—part landscape, part inner vision.

Biographical Note

Bernard Buffet was born in Paris in 1928. At the age of fifteen, he entered the École des Beaux-Arts. His recognition came early: in 1946, he exhibited a self-portrait at the Salon des Moins de Trente Ans, and in 1947, the French State purchased one of his works from the Salon des Indépendants for the Musée National d’Art Moderne.

His career took off rapidly. Winner of the Prix de la Critique in 1948, Buffet was voted the most significant post-war painter in 1955 by the magazine Connaissance des Arts. His instantly recognizable style—defined by stark black contours, expressionist figuration, and a pervasive atmosphere of drama—established him as one of the defining voices of post-war European art.

Elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1974, Buffet became the youngest academician of his generation. His work was exhibited worldwide, and in Japan, a museum was founded in his honor.

Suffering from Parkinson’s disease, Buffet took his own life in 1999 in his studio in Tourtour, in southern France. His prolific and unmistakable oeuvre remains one of the most powerful expressions of French post-war expressionism—at once rigorous, dramatic, and profoundly human.