The Colombian artist who glorified the grotesque
Fernando Botero thought big. A globally significant painter and sculptor and Colombia’s most famous artist, he had an instantly recognizable style, creating rotund, swollen figures with tiny, blank faces. These included pompous, self-satisfied members of the bourgeoisie, teetering ballet dancers, beefy matadors, rotund homages to the old masters, and later the perpetrators and victims of political violence. Some critics called his style gimmicky; one, Botero recalled in 1985, stood in front of the artwork “without looking, because he said it made him sick.” But the public loved him, and by the early 2000s his paintings were fetching as much as $2 million. “I believe a painting has to talk directly to the viewer,” he said, “without a professor to explain it.”
Fernando Botero Angulo was born in Medellín, the son of a salesman who “sometimes made his rounds on horseback,” said The Washington Post. His father died when Fernando was 4, and his mother made a meager living as a seamstress. Prize money from a national art competition in 1952 enabled Botero to study art in Europe, but upon returning to Colombia three years later, he struggled to sell his work. He spent formative stays in Mexico City and then New York City, where a chance encounter with a Museum of Modern Art curator in 1961 led to that institution’s acquisition of the 1959 work Mona Lisa, Age Twelve. The painting “made Botero’s name with the city’s artistic world overnight,” said The Times (U.K.). Over the decades, more paintings went to other major galleries and his sculptures—just as bulbous and sensuous—adorned avenues in Paris, New York, and Madrid. Many of his works depicted politicians, bishops, and generals, though he denied that they were political satire.
Eventually, though, he could not avoid politics, said ArtNews. A 1995 bombing by FARC guerrillas in Medellín damaged Botero’s sculpture Dove of Peace; he cast a replacement and placed it alongside the husk of the first one. A 2004 series of paintings centered on drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. And he scored “a late-career triumph” with paintings set at the Abu Ghraib U.S. prison camp in Iraq, depicting the torture inflicted there. “You read about these things, this violence, and this produces an impact on you,” he said in 2004. “As an artist, you want to reflect on this reality.”