Bernard Buffet, who stayed true to figurative art in the days of abstraction, counts among the most popular artists in the era of existentialism.
The largely self-taught Bernard Buffet created, especially between 1948 and the 1960s, much-praised icons of the post-war era. The sorely afflicted post-war generation found a mirror in Bernard Buffet's miserable, thin, black-contoured figures. Many his works were also released as graphic works, thus the "Buffets", of which there were also numerous originals in all imaginable motif variants in existence, soon flooded the living rooms and anterooms. This must have also been the reason why the public opinion suddenly degraded Bernard Buffet from a "new Picasso" to a "Kitsch painter".
However, in 2008 a large exhibition in the MMK in Frankfurt introduced a new appreciation of the artist: The ever-repeating existentialist evolved to become the founding father of contemporary figuration, about whom Andy Warhol once said he was his favorite artist.