Bernard Buffet: The Bullfighter

In the cries and tears of the end of World War II, an impressive generation of artists is born, who, from literature to cinema, and obviously through painting and photography, will impose a vision: a New French Realism. Because although multi-disciplinary, this movement remains uniquely French.

Between the baptism of the Fifth Republic and the first tremors of decolonization, this generation will express an existential malaise which, through its intellectual gravity and lack of hope, makes it the darkest movement of the post-war period.

Bernard Buffet: The Village Road

Bernard Buffet: Paris: The Sacré-Coeur

From Robbe-Grillet, the pope of the New Novel where the ephemeral lasts a lifetime, to Buffet, the solitude of modern man incarnated in its most scathing nudity, and through Godard whose "Contempt" fits perfectly into this same vain search for an absolute long gone in the realm of unanswered prayers, all express, in an era of reconstruction and Gaullist optimism, a philosophical disenchantment that Sartre's "Being and Nothingness" put into words as early as 1943.

Behind a sometimes outdated pathos (with the passage of years), there is also a real artistic insurrection. Because even if he sometimes (in the 80s) renounced his own existentialism by multiplying his works, how can one not bow to the revolution that is Bernard BUFFET at the end of the 50s? How can one not see in this painting of despair the realization of the infinite solitude of man delivered from God, but trapped in his desire for fierce individualism that reduces him, every day a little more, to the acceptance of a loneliness that applause does not fill...

Bernard Buffet : Vase of Tulips, 1967

Bernard Buffet : New York IX, 1967

Thus, to the sound of post-war rebirth, these black-line painters have engraved our minds with their sharp imprints, those who had been twenty in the wake of Enola Gay, before the nihilists of an overindulgent consumer society came in turn to lay the foundations of a new New Realism...

© Texts & Photos: Natacha PELLETIER for PASSION ESTAMPES