He was the Peter Paul Rubens of modern art. Thanks to the thick thighs, round bellies and puffy heads of his sculpted and painted figures. Size XXXL was still too small for him. The work adorns many city squares or museum walls. And it is always immediately recognizable as a real ‘Botero’.
‘Boterismo’ is the synonym for obesity, when it comes to the people that Fernando Botero portrayed for decades. The artist died on Friday at the age of 91.
Of course there was a period when Botero was not yet ‘Botero’, but a designer and aspiring artist in Colombia. Botero grew up in Medellín. The family was poor. Father died when Fernando was four, mother received support from an uncle in raising her son. That uncle decided that Botero should train as a matador after the Jesuit school, even though he had no talent whatsoever to become a bullfighter.
What he could do: make paintings of bullfights. He turned out to be talented. At the age of 16 he made newspaper illustrations, two years later he had his first exhibition. His move to Europe, where he enrolled at the academy in Madrid, led to rapid fame in both painting and sculpture. Nevertheless, he never completely lost his South American roots, given the bright colors and exuberant shapes, partly borrowed from the Mexican paintings of Frida Kahlo and the muralists José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros.
Persistence
There has not been much development in Botero’s work in recent decades. When he had found his style of slightly over-inflated figures, he persisted in it. A ‘small’ change only occurred in the theme. From 2004 onwards the work became more committed, especially through the photographs of atrocities in the infamous Abu Ghraib prison, where American guards abused Iraqi prisoners. Botero was not unmoved. He showed the work in 2005 at an exhibition in the Palazzo Venezia, Benito Mussolini’s former residence in Rome.
He had previously painted scenes taken from arrests and executions during the civil war in his home country. It may have been why there was an attempt to kidnap him in 1994, and a year later one of his bronze statues was blown up during a music festival in Medellín, killing 23 and injuring 200.
Yet most enthusiasts will mainly remember Botero’s innocent, kitschy images and paintings. Which at their best, when it comes to commitment, are a tribute to the full body, and indirectly a warning against anorexia and the idealized (fashion) image of skinny men and women.
