It is said that asphyxiation brings on a state of hallucinatory intoxication.in which case the 71 year old artist who lay in his sprawling Provencal villa died happy. In the early afternoon of Monday October 4 1999, wracked with Parkinson's, and unable to paint because of a fall in which he had broken his wrist, Bernard Buffet calmly placed a plastic bag over his head, taped it tight around his neck and patiently waited the few minutes it took for death to arrive. His widow found him at four o'clock, and, using the scissors with which he trimmed his beard, cut away the plastic bag to reveal a face that she described as peaceful and smiling. In a last twist of macabre irony the black polythene through which she sliced was printed with two words in her late husband's distinctive angular script 'Bernard Buffet, Bernard Buffet, Bernard Buffet Bernard Buffet.' the name repeated over and over again as if in mute funerary lamentation. Bernard Buffet and the invention of the modern mega-artist' will tell the remarkable story of a French figurative painter who tasted unprecedented critical and commercial success at an age when his contemporaries were still at art school. Then, with almost equal suddenness the fruits of fame turned sour and he found himself an outcast.

Scarred with the contagion of immense commercial success (he was not just rich, he was yacht-rich) no leper was more untouchable. He was the first artist of the television age and the jet age. Such was his celebrity that during the 1960s people spoke of France's two BBs (the other was Brigitte Bardot). Indeed Buffet's role in creating the idea of a post-war France is not to be underestimated and will be explored in this book. As the first of the so called Fabulous Five (Francoise Sagan, Roger Vadim, Brigitte Bardot and Yves Saint Laurent) he was a leader of the cultural revolution that seemed to forge a new France from the shattered remains of a discredited and demoralized country. Rich in incident Buffet's remarkable story of bisexual love affairs, betrayal, vendettas lasting half a century, shattered reputations, alcoholism, and drug abuse, is played out against the backdrop of the beau monde of the 1950s and 1960s in locations as diverse as St Tropez, Japan, Paris and New York, before coming to its miserable conclusion alone in his studio.