ARCADIA
kindly by critics – please forgive my immod- esty and vanity when I say I am for ever grateful to Roger Lewis, who described it in the Times as an ‘alert, first-class biography’. Bernard Buffet is a difficult painter: a
scrawny, shy, ragged youth, he worked with a fierce intensity. He won the Prix de la Cri- tique in 1948, at the age of 20. He painted the Paris he saw, the Paris of shortages, hunger, tedium and misery. These early paintings have a dystopian quality that might resonate in our own uncertain times; cheery is not the first adjective that springs to mind. Starving young artist wracked by existen- tial torment paints pictures of misery… so far, so familiar. Those paintings of misery make him rich… well, good for him. The problem was that Buffet then depart-
ed from the script. It turned out he was al- most as good at being rich as he was at paint- ing. One of his early purchases was a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith, and the sobriquet ‘the Artist in the Rolls-Royce’ stuck with him for life – a life lived in a series of ever grand- er castles and country estates. Of course, today we take it for granted that
successful artists can be rich, but Buffet was not so lucky. Speak to any highbrow critic and they will dismiss him. When I rang the late John Richardson, Picasso’s biographer, to ask for his recollections, he described him as ‘a fashionable mannerist whose work pleased rich bourgeois people who wanted to look perhaps more sophisticated and modern than they were’. That may sting a bit. But, thinking about
it, I suppose that, if not rich, I am bourgeois and not afraid to look more sophisticated than I am. Perhaps that is why I found Buffet fascinating. Although he painted thousands of works, he still found the time to appear regularly in Paris Match and keep up a busy social life. The challenge for me was to give the show a theme broad enough to encompass the va- riety and breadth of the artist’s oeuvre, telling a coherent story that hopefully would illumi- nate some aspect of his life and work. Final- ly, we settled on Buffet and France. The only ‘casualties’ of this topic were a couple of his celebrated sumo wrestler paintings. Buffet was the painter who captured the
spirit and the style of les Trente Glorieuses, the prolonged period of prosperity that lasted from the war’s end to the oil shock of the Sev- enties. He painted the France of my forma- tive years: a fantasy land of elegant women
draped in haute couture, the Citroën DS, blue- silver-and-black cylinders of YSL Rive Gauche, aſternoons at Café de Flore, eve- nings at Brasserie Lipp, maybe a nightcap at Castel and, of course, the omnipresence of Ricard ashtrays for extinguishing one’s Gau- loises or Gitanes. Though by the Seventies France’s days as a power on the world stage had faded, in matters of cuisine, style, and refinement she reigned supreme. Familiar Paris landmarks and rural land-
scapes are seen anew through the eyes of the painter, not least because France has a ten- dency to crop up in some pretty disturbing parts of the painter’s imagination. There is, for example, a series of paintings from 1959 disingenuously named Les Oiseaux, depict- ing giant birds and naked women. Their in- congruity is heightened by the fact that the background landscape is unmistakeably that of a Peter Mayle-approved tourist-bro- chure-appropriate Provence. When it was first exhibited in Paris, Le Figaro called for the closure of the entire exhibition, and 100-metre-long queues formed outside the gallery as Parisians queued up, waiting for their turn to be shocked. Were one to show that sort of work today,
it would at least require a trigger warning and most probably its own discrete exhibi- tion space too. So, if you see lengthy queues forming outside Opera this Frieze, you will know why.
failingly gazetted when it appeared in tabloid newspapers, which, Al-Fayed being Al-Fayed, it did a lot). I remember my dad telling me it used to be possible to buy literally anything from Harrods. If you wanted a giraffe for the arboretum of your stately home, you just put in an order, and if giraffes were legally to be had, they’d make it happen. That is, its history until the end of last cen-
tury was bound up with a very specific idea of English money; and English class. Found- ed by an entrepreneurial Victorian draper- turned-grocer, it turned into a palace of de- light for the aristocracy. There was a stratum of posh-ish people who bought their grocer- ies at M&S and their furniture at Peter Jones; and there was a stratum of poshest people who bought their groceries at Fortnum’s and everything else at Harrods. In its heyday, every blue-blood had an account. Even in the Nineties, you could expect to bump into the odd dowager marchioness pottering in from the Brompton Road. It was back in my thoughts the other day
when I read that they were planning to close food concessions by Tom Kerridge and Gor- don Ramsay. I thought: hey ho. It wasn’t so much the closure of the concessions that struck me as emblematic, but their presence in the first place. Both are Michelin alumni but are now global brands rather than haute cuisiniers. In Harrods, Kerridge was doing fish ’n’ chips; Gordon was slinging burgers. Who eats that food? Tourists. Not all tour-
LITERARY NOTES
SALE OF THE CENTURY
Sam Leith
HARRODS HAS ALWAYS had a small place in my heart. My first job was working for Mohamed Al-Fayed’s ill-fated revival of Punch magazine back in the Nineties. Our of- fices were across the road from the green- gold corner shop our proprietor also owned. Had I been less poor, I could have popped across in my lunch hour to buy gewgaws. But the idea of Harrods, rather than the fact of it, was long before fixed in my mind. It was the ‘Top People’s Store’ (as it was un-
ists, mind. Rich tourists. The sort of tourists who blow in from the Gulf for August and drive their gold Bugattis noisily (and slowly) down the Brompton Road. Harrods hasn’t become cheap. But these days it’s selling an idea of itself – of English class and money and eccentricity – to tourists. And, be it said, the people selling that version of English class to wealthy foreigners are wealthy for- eigners. First Al-Fayed, the ‘phony pharoah’; now the shop’s current owners, a Qatari sov- ereign wealth fund. And ain’t that just the way of the modern
world? The old-fashioned English class sys- tem – though I might have benefited from it, heaven knows I’m not one to defend it; the connection of wealth to bloodlines, the rigid codes of shibboleths, the snobbery – has become a heritage object to be commod- ified and packaged for sale. And it was right in the Nineties, around the time I was getting my lunchtime sandwiches from a down-at- heel caff and slightly wishing I could afford
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