“Opinions may, reasonably, differ on Buffet. He may not be to be everyone’s taste.”

So begins an interesting piece in the Independent this morning on Buffet…not Warren, the investor, but Bernard the painter.

It turns out that Bernard and Warren may in fact have something in common – they are both products of the managerial economy. (Think I  blaspheme against Our Billionaire in Omaha? Check out Warren’s sweetheart deal buying a stake in Goldman Sachs. He paid half what ex-Goldman CEO and former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson paid for the same stake when the public was footing the bill (5 grand versus 10). Back to Bernard:

“What is extraordinary, something with no parallel in the history of modern French art, is that a painter should have been once so admired, and remain admired abroad, but fall so utterly from critical grace in his homeland.

In 1955, he was chosen by 100 critics as the most impressive young painter in the world. In 1956, he was given a spread in Paris Match in which he was presented as the “young millionaire painter”.

Maurice Garnier is a Paris gallery owner and a friend of Buffet until the artist died in 1999. He still has exclusive rights to trade in Buffet paintings. M. Garnier believes it was Buffet’s lightning success and riches, just after the Second World War, which helped to turn the art establishment against him.

“He sold too well,” M. Garnier said. “He made a lot of money. He lived in an ostentatious way. The powers that be hated him for all that.” Buffet incurred, above all, the enmity of two of the great cultural figures of post-war France. The first was Picasso; the second was André Malraux, the writer who became President Charles de Gaulle’s minister for culture in 1959. Picasso would enter Paris galleries and stare at Buffet canvasses for hours, sometimes glaring in silent hatred, sometimes telling visitors how much he hated what he saw before him. Malraux also detested Buffet. M. Perier believes Picasso influenced Malraux, who knew little about art, but he says the culture minister’s motives for bad-mouthing Buffet were also partly political or art-political.

“Malraux was determined to re-establish the reputation of Paris as the art centre of the world,” M. Périer said. “He decided that the ‘abstract’ movement of the 1950s was the vehicle which would achieve that aim. Buffet was anything but an abstract painter. His success and his reputation threatened to muddle the argument that the future of art was abstract.”

Buffet also made another powerful enemy, or at least alienated someone who might have protected, and boosted, his career and reputation. In the 1950s, Buffet, then a homosexual, was the lover of Pierre Bergé, the man who later became the lover and business partner of the fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent. In 1958, Buffet had a spat with Bergé over his new friendship with the then debutant Yves Saint Laurent. Buffet took up instead with a young woman. Perier believes Berge would have reconciled the art establishment with Buffet if the young lovers had not fallen out. M. Garnier goes further and says Buffet attracted the enmity of several powerful gay figures in the art world because he switched his sexual orientation….”

More in The Independent about the spiteful vendetta to denigrate Bernard Buffet by arch rival Picasso and French cultural minister, Andre Malraux.

Comment:

In a previous article (“Portrait of the CIA as an Artist”), I wrote about how the ‘abstract art’ movement was purposely fostered by the intelligence community in the US.  The story of Bernard Buffett depicts another angle of that story and shows how the scheming and envious rivalry of one of the icons of modernity, Picasso, combined with state action (Malraux was the French minister for culture) perverted the course of art – as it recently did of banking.  The exaggerated worth of some artists at the expense of other artists that is a direct result of state intervention is surely as much an indictment of the state as the exaggerated worth of some businesses (financial) at the expense of others.