Le Miserabilist II
About Bernard Buffet's Rolls Royce:
"It is a striking coincidence: in the very year that brought the first expressions, in esoteric circles, of a new current in art that was committed to the reality of the new consumer world,(20) the media savaged a painting that had had the audacity to take a commodity fetish and use it plainly as the subject for a picture."
The difference is that Warhol, et al, satirized commercial imagery, while publishers of magazines and street posters exploited the commercialized style of Buffet. The irony is that advertising cannot exploit Pop Art. It would look like a parody of itself. Buffet parodies nothing. He editorializes. Nothing is unworthy of his attention, or escapes his notice, or is beneath his contempt -like a journalist. See his many illustrations featured on the cover of European mass-subscription magazine covers.
It has been objected that Buffet painted over 2,000 pieces in ten years. That is productive -if not creative. By the same standard, if the journal that offers critical reviews of art publishes daily, or weekly, or monthly, how much material must accumulate in ten years? Banality is journalism. Subscription is habit.
Buffet is aware of Cubism. Here is a portrait by Buffet which looks like Picasso's style, when he was discovering tribal art, including that of his own Iberian roots. Buffet's picture is a nod to Cubism, acknowledgment of Picasso's style -like a brief newspaper report. Compared to Picasso's Cubist style, Buffet's rendition of Cubism looks shallow.
It's not that Buffet can't paint heroically. His style is distinctive. Mountains of paint by lesser talents never even approach Buffet's unique stature. While less satisfying aesthetically than Picasso, there is no ambiguity about Buffet. He paints assertively, leaving nothing to the imagination. He may be thought of as a lifestyle artist. His art is light fare, the sort of subject found in the Lifestyle section of the newspaper.
If artists were modular, and if it were possible to extract the best from an artist, leaving the worse, and do the same for the next artist, and another, until the best of each were to be combined in one–building the perfect artist–what unit of virtue might be extracted from Buffet? I would take Buffet's incisive line, leaving his dross subject matter. His line is like a 10,000 volt electric wire: shocking.
If Buffet also possessed a keen wit he might have been a formidable caricaturist. He is at once reviled for his social revisionism by the Left, as if he had sold-out the revolution, while his portraits of political personages are used as illustration in the same mass-circulation news publications that trade on elitist disdain for his style of art. He is like the syndicated cartoonist everyone loves to hate.
If only his patent ability could be enlisted in the service of a worthy cause! Indeed, I would commission Buffet to paint my enemies, the way Renaissance princes harassed their enemies, by commissioning the writing and spread of scandalous rumors. Buffet has shown no compunction about the commercial use of his paintings. He is mercenary, no doubt about that.
Enough said about the utilitarian exploitation of art, if I may say so, myself. Without bad art there would be no critical theory of art. The opposite cannot be said. As a formal matter, one work of art is as valid as another. Philosophically, it is the critic's personal preferences that should be suppressed, not art, or artists. The fact that Buffet is the democratically elected, most popular artist of all time, is irrelevant to art and criticism.
One-of-a-kind works of art can be viewed at: https://www.saatchiart.com/account/artworks/1840403