Colombian artist Fernando Botero has become known worldwide for domestic and social scenes rendered in gentle colors and populated by extravagantly rounded figures. As Colombian Ambassador to the United States Carolina Barco puts it, Botero is a “universal man, whose surprising parameters of proportion have redefined contemporary art.” Both amusing and disturbing, Botero’s paintings and sculpture create an accessible but often enigmatic world that encourages viewers to make their own interpretations of his images.
Although he spends most of his time outside his native country, Botero (b 1932) is first and foremost a proud Colombian, his heart and art inspired by good times and bad and the natural beauty of that country. “I have never ceased being a Colombian,” says Botero. “My country and ‘Paisa’ origin have been my strength and spirit, the essence of my artistic creation.”
A good summation of the artist’s ample talent is reflected in “The Baroque World of Fernando Botero,” on view at the Nevada Museum of Art through July 25. Organized and circulated by Art Services International in Alexandria, Va., it comprises 100 paintings, drawings and sculpture.
Born in Medellin, in the Colombian Andes, Botero lost his father at the age of four. As a teenager, he drew illustrations for Medellin publications and participated in area exhibitions. Moving to Bogotá, Colombia’s capital, at 19, he was deeply influenced by Mexican mural artists Jose Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Sequiros, and began painting large Orozco-like watercolors.
With some prize money, he enrolled at the Academia San Fernando in Madrid, where Goya and Velázquez became inspirations. Seven years later, drawing on the art of Velázquez, Botero painted a forlorn, frightened “Girl Lost in a Garden.” Subsequently, he created a number of his own versions of the angelic royal princess in Velázquez’s celebrated “Las Meninas” in the Prado Museum in Madrid.
Disillusioned by the French avant-garde art he saw during a sojourn in Paris, Botero spent time copying Old Masters at the Louvre. “He knew,” writes Dutch art historian John Sillevis in the exhibition catalog, “that he could only learn from great masters&” After several years in Italy, where he studied fresco painting and old masterpieces, he returned to Bogotá in 1955.
In addition to getting married and having children, Botero around this time began to expand the volume of forms in his art, launching the mature period of his career. His epiphany came in Mexico City in 1956, when he discovered that when “he reduced the central opening [of the mandolin he was sketching] he changed the proportions and the volume of the mandolin to something huge,” writes Sillevis. “From then on he knew what he was going to do. He would enlarge everything he would draw or paint to a baroque shape, an expression of sumptuousness and sensuality, not only in a human figure, but also in a still life †in fruits or in a mandolin.”
At first, art critics, bedazzled by Abstract Expressionism, were puzzled as to how to evaluate Botero’s style and subjects and in what niche to locate him. Among those who considered figurative art dead,
Botero’s paintings and sculpture are united by their robust, “fat” figures. He explains his affinity for large people by observing that “An artist is attracted to certain kinds of form without knowing why. You adopt a position intuitively; only later do you attempt to rationalize or even justify it.” He bases his choices of colors, shapes and proportions on intuitive aesthetic judgments. Isolated from international art world trends, he considers himself the “most Colombian artist living,” although in recent years drug-trade violence and other factors have made it dangerous for him to stay in his native land. Today, his principal studio is in Paris. He works hard and is a perfectionist, continuing to labor over a painting, pastel or sculpture until he knows he has finished every detail.
“Botero,” observes Sillevis, “makes art for museums&ecause he wishes to confirm his position in the tradition of the history of art.” Thus, the works of Goya and Velázquez, which he came to venerate at the Prado Museum, are so important that “their influence is still noticeable in his recent works, commenting on the disastrous situation in his home country, the atrocities and the total destruction of a social structure.”
If much of his inspiration comes from his Colombian roots, Botero’s style is based on observations of the great masters during his extensive Grand Tour. As art scholar David Elliott writes in the catalog, “Botero’s oversized people, animals, fruits and objects are a kind of abstraction within a coherent style based on classical unities of subject, medium and genre.” Botero’s still lifes, like “Sunflowers,” 1977, owe much to Vincent van Gogh’s floral paintings, although Botero has added his signature voluminous shapes to his flowers and vase.
In “After Piero della Francesca,” 1998, Botero paid homage to the Italian Renaissance master by faithfully translating his original paintings of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino into his own visual vocabulary. But whereas the original diptych is 19 by 13 inches, Botero blew his version up to a huge 80½ by 70 inches for each likeness. “If I paint a picture that has the same theme as that used by a famous painter,” avers Botero, “I am part of that same tradition.”
Among a “Who’s Who” of painters depicted by Botero is an image of a rotund Pablo Picasso as of 1930, when the Spanish Modernist introduced rounded forms into his work. In the late 1990s, Botero also created small but compelling portraits of such artistic heroes as realist Gustave Courbet, romantic/colorist Eugene Delacroix, draftsman extraordinaire Jean-Dominique Ingres and champion of thin, elongated human figures Alberto Giacometti.
Much of Botero’s art is an outgrowth of his vivid memories of growing up in a provincial Colombian town. As Sillevis observes, “Botero has given a very accurate portrayal of the South American way of life in the Twentieth Century, a unique panorama of personalities in a given period of history.”
In typically gargantuan terms, the painter offers glimpses of colorful, crowded street scenes and ballrooms; oversized women in bathrooms; bulbous mothers and children; a corpulent ballet dancer; a bored band performing; a frightened matador and passive picador; and men smoking and posing as models.
In a large, eye-catching painting, “The House of Marta Pintuco,” perhaps inspired by Seventeenth Century Dutch pictures on the same subject, Botero crowds seven people into one room of a brothel. The characters on view range from the madam peering in from the door, a supersize model disrobing for action with a man sleeping on the bed, a second customer chatting with another prostitute, and a man sleeping on the floor next to a chunky, pert infant boy. It is a vivid slice of life in contemporary Colombia.
Botero’s sculptures, characteristically monumental forms modeled in smooth bronze, while reminiscent of voluminous figures modeled by Gaston Lachaise, are unmistakably Boteroesque. The exhibition features a series of voluptuous nudes of both sexes, plus cats, horses and an enormous human hand. Particularly notable is “Leda and the Swan,” drawn from Greek mythology, which freezes the moment when Jupiter †in the shape of a swan †is about to kiss the recumbent wife of the king of Sparta.
The importance of the Roman Catholic Church and religious art and biblical themes in Colombian society is reflected in numerous Boterian images. There are gripping paintings of a virile, bloodied “Christ” wearing a crown of thorns and a depiction of “The Crucifixion” that emphasizes both his agony and muscularity.
Contemporary religious figures range from princes of the church, such as a self-satisfied, red-robed representative of the Holy See and well-fed cardinals and bishops, to a pious nun in a simple habit. These works suggest that Botero, who declares he is not religious, has a deep understanding of the Christian faith and its central role in Colombian life.
He is also acutely aware of the violence and power struggles that have consumed his native land and other countries in Latin America in recent years, as well as contrasts between rich and poor in the region, and the impact of natural disasters on people. Several paintings of “The President” emphasize his elegance and power, while scenes of bloodied dead bodies are reminders of violence in today’s world. Dramatic pencil drawings reflect the plight of common people displaced by political upheaval and natural disasters.
Beginning with paintings of police brutality a half-century ago, Botero has been concerned about the realities of governmental and military excesses and torture around the world. At the end of the 1990s, he began a series of paintings on the effects of the civil war in Colombia among the government, extremist political groups and drug dealers. While realistic about his ability to change the course of events, Botero has felt an obligation to depict the “barbaric violence that is drowning our nation.” Goya has been an inspiration in this regard.
In recent years, the artist’s graphic and powerful depictions of abuses at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq have evoked revulsion, controversy and worldwide attention. Botero pulled no punches in showing the humiliation of prisoners, physically, verbally and psychologically. “With their moral indignation and empathy for the victim, we can understand that these most recent of Botero’s works are icons of anger, sadness, disillusionment and loss,” says Elliott.
Still going strong at 77, it seems likely that Botero will continue to create vivid reminders of man’s inhumanity to man.
Such works, observes art historian Edward J. Sullivan, “refute the&⁰erception of Fernando Botero as an artist at an unbridgeable distance from social or political realities of our time.”
While Botero has achieved considerable commercial success, praise from the art establishment †critics, academics and museum professionals †has been slow in coming. He has been considered out of touch with contemporary art, too commercial in his work and lacking a social conscience.
Many of those contentions are contested by works in the current exhibition. They suggest that, as Sullivan argues, “In all phases of his career Botero has&ooked with a critical, if often subtly judicious eye at the realities of the world around him.” Adds Sullivan, “A place in the realm of artistic creativity and integrity should be reserved for Botero.”
Meanwhile, Botero’s influence on artists around the world is manifest in varied ways in various places. As Elliott observes, Botero “has succeeded in creating a visual vocabulary which other artists can use and repeat for their own purposes because the people who inhabit his world are both different from what is expected, but also ostensibly attractive and strangely familiar. Botero’s work appears to have engendered a kind of folk art in its trail.”
This exhibition documents the manner in which this gifted artist has employed his robust, inflated forms to comment on contemporary issues and societal mores, often with thought-provoking political and social overtones. In creating a world both mundane and wondrous, Fernando Botero is crafting a legacy of art that is memorable for its humor, style †and messages.
After closing in Reno, the exhibition travels to the Winnipeg Art Gallery in Canada (December 4⁆ebruary 27), and the Toledo Museum of Art (March 19⁊une 12, 2011).
The illustrated, 283-page catalog, with informative essays and pithy comments on works in the exhibition, is published by Art Services International.
The Nevada Museum of Art is at 160 West Liberty Street in Reno. For information, 775-329-3333 or www.nevadaart.org .
