Bernard Buffet is best known these days for affordable prints of morose clowns and spindly flowers, signed with his trademark spidery scrawl, but there was a time when he was considered one of the leading lights of post war French art, nipping at the heels of Picasso. His paintings of gauntly elongated, angular figures in minimal settings captured the mood of a nation coming to terms with the horrors of World War II. Buffet's popularity ultimately spoiled him in the eyes of French critics and the art establishment, and his rehabilitation as an artist of substance would only come a decade after his death. Buffet was not religious in a conventional sense but early Jesuit schooling and a devoutly Roman Catholic mother left their indelible mark. Featured in the gallery of the new Bernard Buffet profile page are a selection of drypoints--and the original engraved copper plate of a Crucifixion scene--which Buffet created as illustrations for a 1954 printing in portfolio format of a Passion of Christ text, compiled from various biblical passages. An emaciated figure with shaved head, Christ brings to mind countless anonymous concentration camp victims as he endures the agonies of Holy Week alone, his haggard features a study in cosmic angst. (John Kohan)