It is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation; the implicit morality of our new Greuze is that we are distinctly happier in Belleville than in Manhatten.
This is a folklore New York rather like Bizet's Spain or the Italy of the Theatre Mogador: an exoticism which confirms the Frenchman in the excellence of his habitat.
According to Buffet, the architecture of this city is uniformly longiform and quadrangular. Here the grid reigns under its most ill-favoured aspect: the contour, this black line which encloses everything, obviously intends to expel man from the city.
By obsessively multiplying the window, by inlaying it with black, Buffet empties it, destroys it, makes the living edifice into a dead surface, as if number, unless it is swarming, must fatally establish an abstract order.
To paint New York from above, at the top, is to rely once again on the first spiritualist myth, i.e. that geometry kills man. In his way, Buffet follows in the wake of our venerable moralists, for whom the refrigerator is antipathetic to the soul.
The intentional desolation of his New York-what can it mean except that it is bad for man to live in groups, that number kills the spirit, that too many bathrooms are harmful to the spiritual health of a nation, that a world is too 'modern' is a sinister world, that we are bored when we are comfortable, in short according to the most reactionary remark of human history, the alibi of all exploitations, that 'money doesn't make happiness?' It is not New York which is terrible, it is work.
Roland Barthes: Buffet Finishes off New York
