Bernard Buffet was a French painter, printmaker, and illustrator. An extremely prolific artist, he produced a varied and extensive body of work. His style was exclusively figurative and is often classified as Expressionist and Misérabilisme, as well as collectives such as L'Homme-Témoin and Salon de la Jeune Peinture. Art historians have also classified his formal style as "abstract realism" — a framework in which recognizable, everyday figurative subjects are flattened, enclosed within rigid geometric grids, and stripped of cast shadows to assert the two-dimensional autonomy of the canvas. Curators have further noted that the emotional detachment, repetition, and formal rigidity of his figures share close affinities with New Objectivity portraiture and the anti-subjective descriptive style of the Nouveau Roman.