It is Frieze time again, the great a quo ad quem moment of the British arts calendar, when the caravanserai of the world art market descends upon London. I always make a point of visiting Frieze Masters, where I pass the time looking at things that I cannot afford, presented by people who know full well that I am a tyre kicker but graciously go through the charade of talking to me as if I were a real client.
The art market is a circus like any other, and when the circus comes to town a sort of carnival mood takes over the art-related areas of the capital. Dealers are busy dressing their windows, displaying their wares, and doing their best to carry off that most delicate of alchemical conversions: the transformation of art lovers into art buyers.
It is to this noble end that I find myself in the slightly unusual position of being part of the window dressing.
Last year a friend, who was then working at Opera Gallery, asked me if I would care to curate an exhibition. My curatorial credentials are scanty. In 2015, I put together an exhibition of British tailoring at the British ambassador’s residence in Washington. I believe it even made the morning news. (If Lord Mandelson’s successor is reading this, which I’m sure they will be, I’d be quite happy to reprise the show.)
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For an instant, the thought did flit across my mind that Opera might have decided to get into the male apparel business. But no, my friend explained that she wanted me to curate an exhibition of Bernard Buffet’s paintings, which is not as much of mad idea as it might appear. In addition to the day job of sauntering round the West End’s tailors’ shops and sampling cigars with Edward Sahakian of Davidoff, I have a side hustle as an author and in 2016 I published a biography of Buffet. On the whole it was looked on kindly by critics – please forgive my immodesty and vanity when I say I am for ever grateful to Roger Lewis, who described it in the Times as an ‘alert, first-class biography’.
Bernard Buffet is a difficult painter: a scrawny, shy, ragged youth, he worked with a fierce intensity. He won the Prix de la Critique in 1948, at the age of 20. He painted the Paris he saw, the Paris of shortages, hunger, tedium and misery. These early paintings have a dystopian quality that might resonate in our own uncertain times; cheery is not the first adjective that springs to mind.
Starving young artist wracked by existential torment paints pictures of misery… so far, so familiar. Those paintings of misery make him rich… well, good for him.
The problem was that Buffet then departed from the script. It turned out he was almost as good at being rich as he was at painting. One of his early purchases was a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith, and the sobriquet ‘the Artist in the Rolls-Royce’ stuck with him for life – a life lived in a series of ever grander castles and country estates.
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Of course, today we take it for granted that successful artists can be rich, but Buffet was not so lucky. Speak to any highbrow critic and they will dismiss him. When I rang the late John Richardson, Picasso’s biographer, to ask for his recollections, he described him as ‘a fashionable mannerist whose work pleased rich bourgeois people who wanted to look perhaps more sophisticated and modern than they were’.
That may sting a bit. But, thinking about it, I suppose that, if not rich, I am bourgeois and not afraid to look more sophisticated than I am. Perhaps that is why I found Buffet fascinating. Although he painted thousands of works, he still found the time to appear regularly in Paris Match and keep up a busy social life.
The challenge for me was to give the show a theme broad enough to encompass the variety and breadth of the artist’s oeuvre, telling a coherent story that hopefully would illuminate some aspect of his life and work. Finally, we settled on Buffet and France. The only ‘casualties’ of this topic were a couple of his celebrated sumo wrestler paintings.
Buffet was the painter who captured the spirit and the style of les Trente Glorieuses, the prolonged period of prosperity that lasted from the war’s end to the oil shock of the Seventies. He painted the France of my formative years: a fantasy land of elegant women draped in haute couture, the Citroën DS, bluesilver-and-black cylinders of YSL Rive Gauche, afternoons at Café de Flore, evenings at Brasserie Lipp, maybe a nightcap at Castel and, of course, the omnipresence of Ricard ashtrays for extinguishing one’s Gauloises or Gitanes. Though by the Seventies France’s days as a power on the world stage had faded, in matters of cuisine, style and refinement she reigned supreme.
Familiar Paris landmarks and rural landscapes are seen anew through the eyes of the painter, not least because France has a tendency to crop up in some pretty disturbing parts of the painter’s imagination. There is, for example, a series of paintings from 1959 disingenuously named Les Oiseaux, depicting giant birds and naked women. Their incongruity is heightened by the fact that the background landscape is unmistakeably that of a Peter Mayle-approved tourist-brochure-appropriate Provence. When it was first exhibited in Paris, Le Figaro called for the closure of the entire exhibition and 100-metre-long queues formed outside the gallery as Parisians queued up, waiting for their turn to be shocked.
Were one to show that sort of work today, it would at least require a trigger warning and most probably its own discrete exhibition space too. So, if you see lengthy queues forming outside Opera this Frieze, you will know why.
