Member of the Société des Artistes Indépendants, 1947 Prix de la Critique, 1948 Prix Puvis de Chavannes, 1950 Officer of the Légion d'Honneur,1973 Bernard Buffet (French: [byfɛ]; 10 July 1928 – 4 October 1999) was a French painter, printmaker, and sculptor.

By the end of the 1950s, however, the public and art community turned strongly against him due to changing artistic tastes, Buffet's lavish lifestyle, and his extremely prolific output.

[1][6] In 1946, he had his first painting shown, a self-portrait, at the Salon des Moins de Trente Ans at the Galerie Beaux-Arts.

In 1948, he won his first major prize, the Prix de Critique, sharing it with fellow Expressionist Bernard Lorjou.

[1] By the age of 21, Buffet was already considered one of the greatest stars of the art world, frequently compared to Pablo Picasso.

[3] A 1958 article in The New York Times called him one of the "Fabulous Five" cultural figures of post-war France (the other four were Brigitte Bardot, Françoise Sagan, Roger Vadim, and Yves Saint Laurent).

He was commissioned to make the portrait of Charles de Gaulle for the 1958 Time Man of the Year magazine cover.

His lavish lifestyle--including a Rolls Royce with a chauffeur and a private castle in Provence[6]--made him seem out of touch with the still-struggling economy of post-war France, which he had memorably portrayed in his early paintings.

[1] Another magazine published photographs of Buffet's lifestyle--large castle, expensive furniture, well-fed dogs--alongside the miserable figures of his paintings to implicitly accuse him of hypocrisy.

On 23 November 1973, the Bernard Buffet Museum was founded by Kiichiro Okano, a private collector in Surugadaira, Japan.

[1] At the request of the French postal administration in 1978, he designed a stamp depicting the Institut et le Pont des Arts – on this occasion the Post Museum arranged a retrospective of his works.

That same year, Christie's auction house in London sold Buffet's Les Clowns Musiciens, le Saxophoniste (1991) for £1,022,500, which set the record for the highest-selling work by the artist.