Born in 1928 to a mirror-factory worker and raised in occupied Paris, Buffet emerged from scarcity with a palette of greys and browns that never left him. His angular figures and frozen still lifes seemed embalmed, yet they sold in astonishing numbers. By twenty-eight he owned a Rolls-Royce and a château in Provence, his gaunt face appearing on magazine covers beside Bardot and Saint Laurent. He provoked the avant-garde with the bluntness of youth — “Picasso means nothing to me,” he once said — and built his own kind of modernity: one of visibility, provocation, and mass recognition.

By the mid-1950s, Buffet had become more than an artist; he was a national phenomenon. His gaunt self-portraits and skeletal still lifes distilled the melancholy of a country rebuilding itself from ruins. His was the France of ration cards, church bells, and grey skies — painted in tones so austere they approached the devotional. Critics called his work cold, but the public saw truth in its discipline. By twenty-five, he was a millionaire and a celebrity, his long face and stark lines turning up in magazines and gossip columns alike.

What fascinated Foulkes was precisely this contradiction: a painter whose success made him suspect. Buffet painted despair yet lived amid opulence; he loved Paris yet found its pace unbearable. “I still like the look of Paris,” he admitted late in life, “but I’d hate to live there.” His canvases capture that ambivalence — the pull between beauty and confinement, between the architecture of the city and the isolation it imposed.