The Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt/Main, Germany, is currently presenting a retrospective exhibition of the works of Bernard Buffet, a painting legend of the 1950s and 1960s that has long been pushed aside and neglected in reassessments of the art of that period.

The exhibition "Diving Trips. Drawing as reportage" that has been shown at Kunstverein Hannover and Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in 2004/2005 featured two of Buffet's drawn reportages of industrial life, a portrait of the Burda factory facilities in Offenburg as well as a graphic documentary of Siemens corporation. In the context of that exhibition, his works were confronted with a graphic cycle by the late Alberto Giacometti: "Paris sans fin".

"(The show in) Frankfurt offers a unique opportunity to reconsider Bernard Buffet as an artistic phenomenon - minus all the griping and the official blinders, without the reservations against the work of this paintaholic, without hypocritical orthodoxies raised against him. The door is now wide open again for an art historically informed reassessment that might succeed in shaking off previous limitations. Is it imaginable to - again - to mention this man's name in one breath with Picasso, with his early pink and blue images of jugglers, or perhaps even beyond individual comparisons? Can he hold his own alongside Giacometti? Is his art powerful enough to to make him our contemporary?" (Rose-Maria Gropp, FAZ, April 18, 2008)

The exhibition in Frankfurt is on view until August 3, 2008. A catalogue documenting the exhibition and working off some of the Buffet case's inconsistencies will soon be published.