Bernard Buffet : The Secret Studio

This book provides an insider view of the artist's creative universe through photographs taken by life-long friends and observers of Buffet, one of the most significant artists of postwar Paris.
Bernard Buffet was astonishingly prolific, producing over eight thousand oil paintings, sketches, watercolors, lithographs, and engravings before his tragic suicide in 1999. This intimate album of the artist at work in his studio traces his steps from the 1940s to the 1970s, from the savage coasts of Brittany to glittering St. Tropez, where he met and married his wife Annabel. With unique insight into the artist's interests and influences-from the French primitives of Avignon to Flemish painting and Courbet-this book constitutes the only publication available today on Buffet's life and

This book was sparked by a three-way encounter in 1958 between an artist, a woman, and a photographer: Luc Fournol, then doing a photo spread on the seaside resort of Saint-Tropez, introduced Bernard to Annabel. Now, forty-five years later, Annabel - who became Bernard's wife and life-long companion - comments on pictures taken over the years by Luc, who remained their loyal friend. Because the secret life of an artist truly resides in his work, the mysteries of the studio can be harder to penetrate than the mysteries of the boudoir. Only a close friend could be privy to the struggle of an artist always plagued by anxiety, a struggle that yielded the first portrait of Annabel, the Passion of Christ, figures of the damned from Dante's "Inferno", and his ever-risky self-portraits.