France's neglected artist Buffet commits suicide

France's most prolific contemporary artist Bernard Buffet, who was far more famous abroad than at home, committed suicide yesterday at his home in the Var region of southern France. He was 71.

Maurice Garnier, a Parisian gallery owner who had worked with Buffet for more than half a century, said the millionaire painter had been suffering from Parkinson's disease and had been unable to work for some time. Police said Buffet's wife, Annabel, found him dead in the hallway leading to his workshop, with a plastic bag pulled tightly over his head.

The most successful French artist since the second world war, Buffet burst on to the international scene at the age of 18, but was ignored by the conservative French art establishment.

While two Japanese museums are dedicated to his work, France's leading collection of modern art, the Georges Pompidou centre, never purchased any of his pieces.

"The Japanese consider him the Pope of modern French art," said a Paris art auctioneer, Jacques Tajan, adding that he recently sold a Buffet work to a foreign buyer for £300,000. "His critics in France say he was just a passing fashion, but the fact of the matter is he never went out of fashion."

The painter was equally well known in Italy - the Vatican museum devoted an entire room to his pieta - and in Russia. In 1991 he became the first living artist to have retrospectives at the Hermitage and Pushkin museums in St Petersburg and Moscow.

President Jacques Chirac expressed sadness at the artist's death saying he had "learned with consternation and sadness of the disappearance of a very great painter of our times".

Buffet was born in Paris on July 10, 1928 and studied at the Académie des Beaux-Arts. He first came to critics' attention in 1946 with a compelling self-portrait. He was extraordinarily prolific, averaging a show a year and often completing a painting every other day.

Private collectors and foreign museums snapped up his characteristically rigid and austere still lives, cityscapes and portraits for decades. Buffet also decorated a chapel in central France and designed sets and costumes for several plays and ballets at the Paris opera.

Although another auctioneer, Maurice Rheims, said he thought that Buffet may have killed himself "because of the incomprehension of much of the art world", the painter himself always said that he ignored his critics.

"I never read the papers and I don't watch television," the artist said in 1992. "The critics have turned out to be wrong most of the time. Look at how they misjudged the Impressionists."

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