PROVENANCE:
Galerie Maurice Garnier, Paris
Private collection, Asia

This painting is to be sold with a certificate of authenticity issued by Galerie Maurice Garnier, Paris.

SNOW LANDSCAPE Bernard Buffet showed talent in his youth and was widely known by the 1950s. After his long art career, today there remains a succession of classic works. It is said that Andy Warhol had called him the 'last famous painter'. Born in 1928, his first solo exhibition was held in Paris in 1947, and he continued to exhibit his work around the world. In 1948, Buffet was awarded the 'Prix de la Critique' at the Galerie Saint-Placide. In 1955, he was ranked at the top of Connaissance des Arts magazine's list of the ten best postwar artists. And when he held his first retrospective in 1958, he was heralded by the media as the successor to the artists of the French Realist movement.

At a time when abstract art was at the fore, Buffet was a visible proponent of figurative art. He even joined the anti-abstract art group L'homme Témoin ('man as witness'). Having become the face of figurative art, he attracted a lot of attention and an incessant barrage of criticism. So from the 1970s on, he tended to avoid making public actions that might put him in the media. And starting in the late 1960s, a new landscape series shifted his practice more towards interpretations of the geographic formations flowing forth from his brush.

In November 1973, over a thousand pieces of Buffet's work were collected by Japanese banker Kiichiro Okano, who then built a personal museum for them in Shizuoka, Japan. Only his wife Annabel attending the ribbon-cutting ceremony. In February 1974, an annual solo exhibition with the name Paysages was held at the Galerie Maurice Garnier, displaying a gentle and serene style of paintings that were remarkable for their time. On March 13th, when Buffet was only 46 years old, he was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Apart from being awarded medals and swords, he was formally recognised in France for his extraordinary achievement and historical significance as an artist.

From 1973 to 1975, Buffet's series of ships and warm landscapes painted in golden colours brought back memories for viewers of the beautifully conceived works and pastoral poems of the Barbizon school and pre-Impressionist art in France. The scenes are realistically composed and reminiscent of something seen before. It might have be the oft seen countryside bridges, fabrics being woven in a quiet song. Sometimes even Montmartre artists, such as Maurice de Vlamnick and Mauric Ultrillo, would come to Paris, with their brushstrokes smoothly flowing and full of power. 1976 saw the world debut of the Paysages de Neige series. The well-known French daily Le Figaro published a story about this new work on February 7th, praising the different approach and the feeling of calm and peace afforded by the horizontal compositions. From the time of the Ancients until his day, no artist had ever demonstrated brushwork so adept with solid black lines and which could so exceptionally find expression for the inhospitably cold and bleak landscapes of winter.

The 1976 work La Route de Saint-Firmin et la mare, Hiver was completed in the small town of Villiers-le- Mahieu on the outskirts of Versailles, where the painter worked by the dark of night alone in his studio. The painting guides the viewer's sight from the bottom left corner toward the centre of a road. Sunlight brings brightness but no warmth as it pierces through the wintery banks of clouds. Beneath are bare branches pointing to the sky and dark earth replete of life thanks to the cold. A frozen pond shines like a mirror that reflects the sky while the only thing that brings any warmth is the yellow sand in the yard in front of a small house. In his prime, Buffet shunned the world and painted scenes devoid of human subjects, only releasing the powerful flames of his practice in his brushstrokes.