Colombia's Fernando Botero

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MEDELLIN (By Rene Rodriguez, Hispanic Magazine) August 25, 2007 — The Medellín of Fernando Botero's youth was a drastically different city from the sprawling metropolis it is today. In the 1930s, when Botero was still a boy entertaining dreams of becoming a bullfighter, Medellín was practically cut off from the rest of Colombia. No roads wound through the mountains that surround the city, no expressways connected Medellín's residents to neighboring towns.

Medellín offered no museums of any kind for the young Botero to visit—no place for his imagination to be stirred, his creativity sparked, by great works of art. Not until Botero was 15 years old did he come across a book of modern art and discovered, as he puts it, "Picasso and the Impressionists and the rest of those guys. I didn't even know this thing called art existed."

Leafing through that book was, Botero says, "a revelation," one that led him to move to Europe to study art at the age of 20, and art eventually became his life's passion. Today, Botero is the best-known living Latin American artist in the world, and one of the most important figures of late-20th century art. His lusty, color-drenched paintings and massive metal sculptures have been exhibited around the world, routinely fetching mid- to high-six-figures in auctions.

Known for the rotund, voluminous shapes and dimensions of their subjects, Botero's works reject the abstract expressionism and minimalism popular today. Instead, Botero's paintings pay tribute to his beloved homeland. The tranquility and security of small-town life, the pomp and pageantry of upper-crust society, the carnal sensuality of women, the mystery and drama of the Catholic church, and the meticulousness of the military and government are recurring subjects of Botero's brush, often rendered with a warm nostalgia, a piquant whimsy, and a satirical sense of humor.

"Botero is the best-known and most highly regarded Latin American artist working today," says Virginia Miller, owner of the Artspace/Virginia Miller Galleries in Coral Gables, Florida. "He has an entirely original style of painting that's been associated with the school of Latin American writers headed by Colombian Gabriel García Márquez. His work is rooted in Colombia, and it occupies a very prominent place in contemporary art."

"Everyone knows what a Botero painting or sculpture looks like," says Fernando Gutiérrez, director of the Marlborough Florida in Boca Raton, Florida. "His impact has been universal. He went against the grain and developed a unique vocabulary of proportion, color,and light that has been widely copied. To our eyes it may seem distorted, but in his paintings, the world is in perfect proportion."

Botero's success has made him one of Colombia's most beloved sons and benefactors. Last year, the artist raided his extensive art collection for a monumental donation of nearly 200 paintings and sculptures, valued at over $100 million, to museums in Bogotá and Medellín. Along with Botero's own works, the donation included paintings and sculptures by Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Wifredo Lam, and Edgar Degas.

The collections, housed at the Museo de Antioquia in Medellín and Donación Botero in Bogotá, have met with extraordinary acclaim. "We have 1,000 visitors daily here in Bogotá. On weekends, it's 2,000," says Darío Jaramillo, cultural advisor to the Banco de la República in Bogotá, which handled the transaction. "There's a euphoria in the air about Botero's gift to the Colombian people. A museum like this one, that tells the history of 20th century art, is unique not only in Colombia, but in all of Latin America."

Despite his renown, Botero remains a humble, warm and approachable figure. Although his primary residence is in Paris, Botero maintains homes in Monte Carlo, Italy, and New York, where he came to attend the opening of an exhibit of sculptures at Manhattan's Marlborough Gallery earlier this summer.

He answers the door to his Park Avenue apartment dressed in crisp slacks and buttoned shirt, apologizing heartily for being 15 minutes late ("I was painting," he explains, grinning sheepishly). His cheerful demeanor is at odds with the romanticized image of the brooding, tormented artist with furrowed brow and paint-splattered smock, working out his demons on a canvas.

“That concept of the tortured artist is a cliché," he says, laughing. "There are many people who think artists have to be sad, poor, dirty, and ridden with tuberculosis. Some artists even try to live up to it. But I think it's silly. I don't have any of that. It's the opposite."

Instead, Botero sees the artist as a messenger, delivering a crucial spiritual salve to the world at large.

“Art is a spiritual, immaterial respite from the hardships of life," he says. "A painted landscape is always more beautiful than a real one, because there's more there. Everything is more sensual, and one takes refuge in its beauty. And man needs spiritual expression and nourishing. It's why even in the prehistoric era, people would scrawl pictures of bison on the walls of caves. Man needs music, literature, and painting—all those oases of perfection that make up art—to compensate for the rudeness and materialism of life."

It's his belief in the importance of art that led Botero to make his generous donation. He believes it's a way to counterbalance the grim reality of Colombia, a country swept by violence during the past three decades, with a more hopeful force of good. "The stereotype of Colombia as a violent place has a lot to do with reality," Botero says. "It's not something that's made up. It's a cancer that has afflicted the country, and it's going to take us a long time to change our image."

Then, after a pause, Botero corrects himself.

"It's not even a matter of changing our image; it's a matter of changing our reality, so that image evolves into something better."

It's a reality even Botero has been unable to elude. In 1995, a bomb was detonated beneath one of his bronze sculptures, The Bird, at an outdoor plaza where a street festival was taking place, killing 27 people. The culprits were never apprehended. "First, they said it had been drug traffickers. Then a group of urban guerrillas said that I was exploiting the Colombian people, so they blew it up as a symbol," Botero says, shaking his head. "The most painful thing was that there were so many innocent people killed. If they wanted to destroy the sculpture, they could have done it at five in the morning. But they waited until there was a street festival going on, with people dancing and live music. I don't understand that. Was it an act against me? Against the people? We never found out."

Botero responded by replacing the shattered sculpture with a new one, but insisted the remains of the original piece be left standing on its bronze base three meters away, so the two sculptures could symbolize peace and violence. .

More trouble came in 1996, when his son Fernando Botero Zea was sentenced to 90 months in prison for accepting funds from the Cali drug cartel to finance the campaign of former President Ernesto Samper.

“After that scandal, I didn't speak to him for three years," Botero says. "But he's my son, and as a father, I have to try to forget what happened. It's difficult, and it took me a long time to accept what he did, which was so wrong. But today we talk. He's living in Mexico, teaches at a university and has a radio show. He's happy there, and he comes to my home in Italy every summer with his kids and spends a month there. Life is that way."

Last year, Botero unveiled a series of paintings that focused on the bloodshed caused by Colombia's enduring violence and its rampant drug trade. Marking a drastic change of pace from his usual domestic tableaux, but still bearing the same rotund figures for which he is known, the paintings speak to the horrifying reality of the artist's birthplace.

In Slaughter of the Innocents, a man prepares to plunge his knife into a cowering woman clutching her infant to her chest while a child kneels on the ground, begging for mercy. In The Hunter, a shotgun-wielding guerrilla stands over a bullet-riddled corpse, his foot planted on the dead man's shoulder. And in The Death of Pablo Escobar, the notorious drug baron is caught in a hail of police bullets on a rooftop, gun in hand, mortally wounded.

"Like many Colombians, I left my country disillusioned by the war we're living through," says Francisco Daza, a Miami-based journalist. "Fernando's art has always referred to Colombia, but these new paintings reflect our country in a different way—the death, the kidnappings, the hunger, the violence. There was one piece in particular, showing the skeleton of a woman cradling a skeleton baby in her lap, that I found tremendously moving. With their representation of violence, these works operate on a new, transcendent level."

The startling paintings, on display at the Colegio de San Ildefonso in Mexico City until July 15, will tour the United States next year as part of a traveling exhibition that will be launched in Stockholm this September. Botero knows the paintings are unlike anything he has done before, but he says he wasn't trying to make a political statement.

"My motivation was not to try to stop the violence or anything like that. They are simply a testimony to a reality that has become unbearable and impossible to ignore: the massacres, the torture, the processions of coffins—all the things that, unfortunately, you see in Colombia today.

"And a painter can do things a photographer can't do, because a painter can make the invisible visible," he adds. "There were no photographers around the day Pablo Escobar died. But I can paint a painting that shows how I imagine his death unfolded. He was half-naked, barefoot, on a rooftop with a gun in his hand. The image is a synthesis of what occurred, and it has the power to stay in your memory, because it's an image that's been carefully composed and polished, so it goes straight to the brain.

"But that does not mean," Botero is quick to add, "that I am going to dedicate my art entirely to that now."

Instead, Botero will continue following his muse wherever it leads him. At 68, he works at the same prolific pace he's maintained throughout his career, painting every day, not out of responsibility, but simply for "the pure pleasure of it." Botero knows that his work is not unanimously admired by critics—in a 1999 interview with TV's 60 Minutes, Columbia University art professor Rosalind Krauss described Botero's art as "pathetic"—but he says that comes with the territory.

"I have as many detractors as I have supporters," Botero says. "In art, it's very difficult to attain any kind of consensus. Many people think Picasso was a terrible painter. Not that I'm comparing myself to Picasso, because his art was very different. But the Impressionists were considered awful artists in their time, and today they're considered geniuses. So you just have to content yourself with the fact that at least some people love your work, and keep moving forward.

"Besides, what's most important is that I like it, because I paint for me first of all. If someone else likes it, that's great. But even if they don't, I'm going to keep going, because this is what I want to do."