Master of Mirth
He trained as a bullfighter but became an artist. Colombia’s Fernando Botero, renowned for his infatuation with the inflated, is enjoying growing popularity in Asia, writes Madeleine Ross
He trained as a bullfighter but became an artist. Meet Colombia’s Fernando Botero on the eve of an exhibition of his sculpture on the Central Habourfront
throughout his career, Fernando Botero has had to justify an obsession with fatness. Whether painted on canvas or cast in bronze, his pneumatic, often comical figures have become the hallmark of a style so distinctive it’s earned a name, Boterismo. I’m familiar with the artist’s commentary on the subject; I know that rather than a fetish for obesity, his infatuation with robust forms is purely technical. Nevertheless, on the eve of our meeting I’m determined to unearth some childhood preoccupation with food or a suppressed memory of a voluptuous wet nurse.
“Hello! Welcome!” he exclaims in a thick Colombian accent when I enter his hotel suite. It’s a cold, polluted day in Beijing and his apartment is abuzz with family members, photographers and press officers. The artist is sharply dressed in monochrome—not what you might expect from the king of colour. His shock of grey hair is combed straight back and his circular, black-rimmed spectacles frame a strong face full of character. “Now, where are you from?” he asks as he settles on the sofa, subtly slapping his palms on his thighs as if to say, “Let’s begin.”
I had expected he’d be tired, perhaps a little senile and surely eccentric. But the 85-year-old before me is vital and engaged. His wife, Greek sculptor Sophia Vari, 10 years his junior, wanders in and out of the room putting on her face as the interview proceeds, while his grandson sits with us to help translate difficult words. It’s a charming family affair.
Botero is one of the most famous—and prolific—living artists. Renowned for his bright, figurative oil paintings, he is sometimes referred to as the Picasso of South America. He began painting in his teens and says he has done so every day since, often standing at his easel for six hours or more. “I paint on Saturday and Sunday too because I haven’t found anything that excites me more,” he says. His son, Juan Carlos, vouches for this when we meet later that day. “When my father goes to a cocktail party he is exhausted within an hour, but he works easily for 10 hours on his feet without showing the slightest sign of fatigue. When he enters his studio he is transported to another world. He truly believes life is worth living, and his work celebrates life. I think that is why he has so much energy, why he has lived for so long.”
The artist has a knack for mixing pleasure with business. His works regularly sell for more than a million US dollars, making him, without doubt, one of the most commercially successful artists alive. He has been honoured with solo exhibitions from Tokyo to Athens and his work is housed in New York’s Museum of Modern Art and various other institutions globally. Regardless of whether you like his work, his ability to straddle the divide between populism and high art is fascinating.
Right now in Asia, Botero is having a moment. His solo exhibition last year at the National Museum of China in Beijing was so popular that it travelled to the China Art Museum in Shanghai in February. At Art Basel in Hong Kong, Botero’s 2006 painting At the Park sold to an Asian collector for US$1.3 million within an hour of the doors opening. Two bronzes by the artist, from 2006 and 2011, sold by the end of the first day for US$400,000 each. This month, a collection of his sculptures, including his celebrated Woman Smoking a Cigarette (1987), will go on show on Hong Kong’s Central Harbourfront.
His popularity, he believes, stems from the fact his work “speaks directly to the people.” Innately decorative, his paintings are balanced compositions, rendered in harmonious, bright colours that depict mostly “gentle” subject matter. His son describes them as “magnificent visual poems” thanks to colours that resonate and cohere. “So often these days,” says the artist, “audiences need to be told why something is important. I believe that art should speak directly. When I’m in front of a great painting I don’t need anyone to tell me it’s great. All the greatest painters, Michelangelo, Giotto, Piero della Francesca, thought in terms of colour and form; they all talked directly to the viewer. I see their work and I want to drink it! But now the trend is to make art obscure, to make audiences believe something is there when usually there is nothing.”
Technique is Botero’s bedrock. As a student of the Quattrocento masters, he has never warmed to conceptual art. “Now some artists think an idea is enough. Apparently it’s not necessary to do the work anymore; it’s enough just to think about the work. I like art that
leaves a footprint, art that marks a moment in the story of man. This conceptual kind of art just stays in the mind. I’m for the kind of thing that is clear and direct and endures.”
There’s something disarming about Botero’s narrow, unfashionable approach to art criticism. The overwhelming purpose of art, in his mind, is to produce pleasure. Indeed, as you stand before one of his paintings, you can almost feel endorphins gush. “Some people think it’s wrong to give pleasure. They think this is prostitution. I think they are wrong,” says the artist. “The whole history of art is there to prove that pleasure, whether intellectual or physical, is key to great art.”
Pleasure comes in various forms. It’s not just inspired by beauty, but also by humour. The artist has done many interpretations of his idols’ paintings, inflating the figures of iconic works like those in Jan van Eyck’s 1434
Arnolfini Portrait. I tell him I can’t help but laugh when I see these appropriations. “Well, I am glad to hear that,” he roars. “When you look at a painting by [Pieter] Bruegel [the Elder] you see a touch of humour. You know, at the time he was painting he was called Pieter the Funny? There is a lot of humour in so many artists, even Goya and Velázquez. They all had a sense of humour.”
His detractors have called his work predictable and simplistic. “Elephantine and expensive,” is the way one BBC journalist described it in a 2007 article. I ask Botero whether criticism fazes him. “Ah, these days people think that we artists are like fashion designers. We’re expected to change our style constantly to stay relevant. But all the greatest artists in the world had conviction and a style that remained with them for all their lives. Botticelli was Botticelli from his first day until his last day. Renoir painted like Renoir all his life. These people believed in something very strongly and this belief and this conviction marked their whole body of work.” Botero’s hands move as if he’s conducting an orchestra, albeit in slow motion. “To be an artist you have to have conviction. No flirting around!”
For many artists, the studio is a forum in which they can process personal trauma. The work of such artists as Frida Kahlo, Francisco Goya and Tracey Emin is charged with pain. But personal pain is not something Botero feels his audience need be subjected to. “It is not the role of an artist to do psychoanalysis through their work. I’m not a dramatic person. I don’t have demons inside me,” he pauses and flashes a smile, “well, only sometimes. But I enjoy life. I enjoy my work.”
That’s not to say he’s led a life devoid of suffering. His son Pedro—the child he had with his second wife, Cecilia Zambrano— was killed in a car accident at the age of five. Botero’s own father died when he was a child, and his mother, a seamstress, had to provide for the family. Nevertheless, asked to recount the hardships of his youth, he brushes the issue off. “When you have no money it’s harder to be happy.” I push for sentimental details. “Well, we survived, but I was not jumping for joy every morning,” he says, throwing his big, poetic hands into the air. “When you are a child and you can’t have things that your friends have, it’s frustrating, but that’s life,” he shrugs.
In 2005, Botero shocked his critics and admirers with a series of gruesome paintings of torture at the Us-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. What motivated his departure from sunny familial scenes and still lifes? In addition to art’s purpose as “an oasis, a place or refuge from the hardness of life,” it can also act as a “permanent accusation,” he tells me. “Because of Picasso’s Guernica we will always remember that the Germans bombed a small town in Spain. Time erases things, but art immortalises them. I was shocked that no American painter tackled the issue of Abu Ghraib,” he says. The paintings weren’t entirely without precedent. In the late 1990s
“AH, THESE DAYS PEOPLE THINK THAT WE ARTISTS ARE LIKE FASHION DESIGNERS. WE’RE EXPECTED TO CHANGE OUR STYLE CONSTANTLY TO STAY RELEVANT. BUT ALL THE GREATEST ARTISTS IN THE WORLD HAD CONVICTION AND A STYLE THAT REMAINED WITH THEM FOR ALL THEIR LIVES”