Venise, le Pont du Rialto

In 1950, Bernard Buffet met Pierre Bergé in a café on the Rue de la Seine in Paris. The two young men quickly became lovers, and moved together in Provence, where Buffet’s art dealer, Maurice Garnier, had found him a home. They would remain inseparable over the next eight years. During their idyll, Buffet and Bergé travelled to the Venice Biennale in 1956, where the artist was set to represent France. As Nicholas Foulkes explained, “at the time when Buffet arrived to represent his country, it was, according to one historian of the event, characterized by tastes that favoured France often at the expense of visiting nations” (Bernard Buffet: The Invention of the Modern Mega-Artist, London, 2016, p. 123). Foulkes notes that the Biennale was the perfect environment for the artist: “rigidly figurative, and possessed of an immense artistic culture” (ibid., p. 124). His time in Venice was thus one of great enjoyment and artistic success. Soon after their return however, the idyllic period ended as Bergé left Buffet for the new artistic director of Dior, Yves Saint-Laurent. The present work was painted just two years after the couple’s separation, and is reminiscent of one of the great periods of Buffet’s life. Executed in the artist’s signature style of strong black outlines, Venise, le pont du Rialto holds a sense of melancholy—the gondolas are empty, except for two gondoliers, as if time was standing still, the painting a memento of happier days.