Bernard Buffet

Born in Paris, Buffet was celebrated at twenty and vilified by forty. His early post-war paintings — grey, emaciated figures drawn in hard black outline, bare interiors, spiny still lifes — spoke directly to a country in ruins, and made him famous almost immediately.

The critical establishment turned against him as abstraction became dominant and his commercial success grew, though the work continued with the same severity for five decades: clowns, Paris landscapes, bullfights, and a late series confronting his own illness. He died at Tourtour in 1999.