Botero was a world-class artist and a vocal critic of ‘absurd’ conceptual art
When Colombian artist Fernando Botero died on Sept. 15 at age 91, media around the world noted that he was Latin America’s best-known painter and sculptor, and that his voluminous figures are exhibited in the most prestigious museums.
But what few obituaries mentioned is that he was also one of the most courageous artists of his generation.
Botero, who spent most of his life in New York, Paris and Pietrasanta, Italy, was anything but politically correct when it came to expressing his views on some of the biggest icons of contemporary art. He defied conventional wisdom in artistic circles by suggesting that much of today’s art is bad, saying art should be beautiful.
In an extended interview in 2013, Botero told me that much of today’s conceptual art — in which the concept behind the artwork tends to be more important than the object itself — will soon be forgotten. “Conceptual art, videos, etc., is fashionable, it’s is considered avant-garde. But, of course, there is no such thing as an eternal avant-garde,” Botero told me. “This current production seems absurd, but it’s the fashion of the moment.”
Art has become a big business, in which some artists buy their own works to inflate their prices, Botero told me. Speaking about Damian Hirst, the British artist whose tiger shark preserved in formaldehyde in a fishbowl was sold in 2005 for $12 million, Botero said,
“Well, there is a truly outrageous market manipulation.” The Colombian painter cited press reports that Hirst had himself bought one of his artworks at an auction for an exorbitant price, and added, “That has little to do with art and a lot to do with commerce.”
Despite the current popularity of videos and installations, painting as an art form will never disappear, Botero told me.
“Painting cannot be replaced by videos or installations, because videos have more to do with TV and movies, and installations have more to do with theater,” Botero said. “Painting is something more difficult, because it’s done on a flat surface, and it’s harder to find a personal style and a fresh vision after all the works that have been painted in history.”
He added that most videos and installations we see in museums and art galleries today amount to a “contest of extravagance,” in which artists constantly compete to produce the most extravagant work.
The problem with this, he said, is that extravagant art is not necessarily good art.
Toward the end of that interview, I asked him whether he thought that art should be beautiful. He answered, categorically, “Indeed, art should be beautiful. Of course, art can be about a kind theme or about a dramatic theme. There can be beauty on both sides.”
He cited Goya’s dark, dramatic paintings as an example of tragic but, at the same time, beautiful art. But he added that “the vast majority of paintings deal with kind themes. I always ask, ‘Who has seen a sad, or negative, or depressing impressionist painting? It doesn’t exist, and there are thousands and thousands of Impressionist paintings.”
“Botero hated being described as a painter of fat people. His son, the writer Juan Carlos Botero, recalls that his father “never in his life thought he had ever painted a fat person.” His art didn’t depict obesity, but emphasized the volume of things to magnify reality.
The Italian Renaissance painters of the 1400s, especially Piero della Francesca, were Botero’s inspiration. And although he wasn’t politically active, Botero periodically made political statements through his art, like when he made a series of paintings based on photographs of prisoner abuses in the U.S. prison of Abu Ghraib in Iraq, or in his satirical depictions of lonely, seemingly depressed generals and cardinals.
Although some art critics despised the apparent simplicity of his figures, Botero found a unique style based on an ancient Italian school of art, and used it to depict his homeland and its people with a mixture of humor and melancholy.
He portrayed Latin America like few others in any art form, and he wasn’t afraid to defy conventional wisdom.
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