“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”
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 Botero produced a series of works about Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, although these were arguably less confronting—and