Eight years ago, when he won the prized French critics' award for his gruesome oils of skinned rabbits, skinny chickens and harsh still-lifes, Bernard Buffet was a gaunt and gangling youth of 20 who personified postwar misery and despair. Lacking canvas, he painted on his mother's sheets. He lived in a narrow, unheated room and went to the Louvre "not to look at the pictures but to keep warm." Last week a plumper Bernard Buffet, nattily turned out in English tweeds, rolled up to Paris' fashionable Drouant-David Gallery in his chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce. He...
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