With a meteoric rise to the forefront of the international art stage, Bernard Buffet became a household name in the 1950s. Instantly recognizable, the artist’s work was highly sought across Europe and America. Awarded the prestigious Prix de la Critique at only twenty years old, Buffet had accumulated an immense personal fortune by the age of 30, leading to a 1956 feature in Paris Match which presented Buffet as the “young millionaire artist.” For more than a decade after his initial solo exhibition in 1947, unimaginable success followed Buffet, leading to his first major retrospective in 1958, at the young age of thirty.

With an artistic ideal that involved shocking and unsettling viewers, the artist’s distinctive linear style first appeared in 1946, with thin black lines scrawling across his canvases. Adamantly insisting that he was a painter and not an artist, Buffet found a visual lexicon with which to represent the sensitivities of the Post-War generation. With bold, confrontational lines against garish and flamboyant colors, Buffets paintings portrayed an underlying angst and turmoil which resonated with a society recovering from the violence and atrocities of World War II. The clearly apparent aggression within his paintings is tempered, however, by a sense of restriction and suppression; the rage and ire is measured and balanced, left seething under the initial surface. Appealing to a European population which identified closely with his artistic ideals, Buffet’s international breakthrough came when he was only 21 years old, propelling him into the cultural life of Paris and other major world cities throughout the 1950s.

Painted in the same year as the artist’s premier retrospective, Hortensias Bleus exhibits the stark, harshly linear aesthetic which captivated viewers at the height of Buffet’s celebrity. With thick lines splayed in wild abandon in a central explosion of black, Buffet’s simple still life manages to capture the unsettling quality of aggression and unrest which characterize Buffet’s oeuvre. Despite a static subject matter, Hortensias Bleus retains a confrontational atmosphere, with rushed lines and bleeding colors exuding a sense of movement and haste. Against a harshly washed background of light yet garish yellow, the bold black lines seem unable to contain the vibrant green of stems and leaves as it bleeds out from beneath the heavy dark slashes of black. Dashing out in fervent strokes, the green streaks across the background in vertical stripes reinforcing the linear quality of the composition as a whole. Combining with the stark yellow, this green helps to establish a sickly luminescence, heightening the sense of underlying unease. In direct divergence, the gentle blues of the flowers themselves sit quietly confined by the nests of thorny black, highlight the surrounding turbulence in their contrasting tranquility. Buffet’s iconic spiked signature, an exalted branding for the artist, completes this sense of abrasive discord, in a piece representative of the enthralling style which propelled Bernard Buffet to his exalted status during the post-war 1950s era.