Annabel

On 12 December 1958 Bernard Buffet married the writer and actress Annabel Schwob in glittering St. Tropez. She soon would become one of his favourite models and featured in Buffet's early to later work. The present lot is part of a series of portraits of Annabel, painted around 1960. Annabel was the belle of the French society with her exotic beauty. She supported Buffet all her life. In the early sixties France was still whirling by a post-war state of great excitement. In Buffet's linear and unique style of representational painting he preferred to use patriotic colours like blue, white and red. He emphasized his forms with black lines. Like Annabel, Buffet formed a cultural relationship with the French Avant-garde artists of his generation like the writer Françoise Sagan (1935-2004), the poet and novelist Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) and the author Jean Giono (1895-1970).