Miserablism

also: Misérabilisme

movement c. 1940s-1950s France Europe

Miserablism (French: Misérabilisme) is the strain of French figurative painting, flourishing from the 1940s into the 1950s, that made postwar misery its subject. Francis Gruber is credited with beginning the movement in his melancholy, sculpted figure paintings; Bernard Buffet became its emblem, painting 'miserabilist' scenes of poverty and despair that made him the most celebrated young painter in France by the early 1950s. Buffet and Bernard Lorjou founded the anti-abstraction group L'Homme-Témoin ('The Witness-Man') to champion figuration as a record of postwar alienation and anxiety. Critics later dismissed the style as mannered and commercially repetitive, but twenty-first-century retrospectives have reassessed its graphic severity and its unsparing image of a wounded Europe.

Time magazine, Volume 73 Issue 1. Front cover is an illustration of Charles de Gaulle.Public domain (credit: Time Inc., illustration by Bernard Buffett. Time failed to r) · source

Defining characteristics

Thick, hard black contour lines enclosing every figure and object
Elongated, emaciated figures with pinched faces and bony hands
Flattened space with little depth of field
Muted, ashen palette drained of bright color
Bleak subjects: poverty, despair, and memento mori motifs

Key figures

Francis Gruber (1912-1948) — French painter credited with beginning the Misérabiliste movement
Bernard Buffet (1928-1999) — Leading figure of the style, known for 'miserabilist' scenes of postwar despair
Bernard Lorjou (1908-1986) — Expressionist and fellow founding member of L'Homme-Témoin

Example works

Self-Portrait — Bernard Buffet (1946)
Piéta — Bernard Buffet (1948)
Illustrations for Les Chants de Maldoror — Bernard Buffet (1952)

Sources

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