The art of Fernando Botero is widely known, revered, paraphrased, imitated and copied, For many, his characteristic rounded, sensuous forms of the human figure, animals, still lifes and landscapes represent the most easily identifiable examples of the modern art of Latin America. For others, he is a cultural hero. To travel with Botero in his native Colombia is to come to realize that he is often seen less as an artist and more as a popular cult figure.
In his native Medelln he is mobbed by people wanting to see him, touch him or have him sign his name to whatever substance they happen to be carrying. On the other hand, Botero’s work has been discredited by those theorists of modern art whose tastes are dictated more by intellectual fashion than by the perception of the power of his images. Botero is undoubtedly one of the most successful artists in both commercial and popular terms, and an artist whose paintings deal with many of the issues that have been at the heart of the Latin American creative process in the twentieth century.
An indispensable figure on many international art and social scenes on at least three continents, Botero’s ‘persona’ might be compared to that of one of the seventeenth -century artists he so much admires, Peter Paul Rubens. Rubens represents the epitome of the standard notions of the “baroque”. His own fleshy, eroticized figures exist in a world of exuberance and plenitude in both the realms of the sacred and the profane. Like Rubens, Botero is an individual whose intense engagement with the world around him enriches his perceptions, heightens his discernment of both the material and spiritual nature of specific things, places and people.
Also in the manner of Rubens, Botero celebrates the palpable, quantifiable tangibilities of earthly existence without slighting more ethereal values. Rubens was a diplomat by both profession and character. Polished in manner and eloquent in his words, he moved easily within many realms of Baroque society in his native Flanders as well as in Italy, England, France and Spain. Botero is similarly peripatetic and likewise gifted in his comprehension of the wide variety of human values and emotions.
He is, in both his personality and his art, as comfortable with bullfighters as with presidents, with nuns as with socialites. His images of this range of types presents his audiences with a panoramic view of the noble and the ignoble of modern society on both sides of the Atlantic, above as well as below the Equator. The term “Botero” has become something of a generic word. In the popular conception, a “Botero” is a man or a woman – or any other animate or inanimate thing – possessed of large, rounded proportions.
There are “Botero forks” and “Botero cats” just as there are “Botero women” or “Botero children”. For many, the concept of “Botero” represents a celebration of sensuality or a reveling in voluptuousness. However, through international exhibitions along some of the most famous streets of the world’s largest cities, his paintings, drawings and monumental sculptures have become so well known that their often complex meanings, in many cases l have become all but obscured.
While Botero’s art is tangibly present as an indispensable part of popular visual culture in the Western imagination, its deeper references and the processes of its creation have become camouflaged by both its highly visible public profile and its commercial appropriation. The art of Botero must be read on a variety of planes. The levels of meaning unfold when scrutinized under the lens of both his historical development and the intentions of the messages that his paintings, drawings and sculptures convey Botero’s career developed out of a virtual void of art historical tradition.
The semi- isolated cities and towns of central Colombia had little contact with the larger world of ”culture” in its conventional contexts when the artist was developing his talent in the 1940s and early 1950s. In another context, however, Botero availed himself of artistic modes distinct from the modernity of the major urban cultural centers of South America at this time. His observation of the colonial images, both painted and sculpted, in the churches of his youth, served as a rich spring that fed the imagination of a child already endowed with a craving to make art.
The religious paintings and sculptures of provincial chapels or home altars naive expressions of religiosity according to standard classifications and hierarchies of art, but central to the spiritual nourishment of the populace throughout the centuries in urban and rural Latin America – are key to understanding the beginnings of the aesthetic of Botero, Later he would excavate his memories of such things, re-encountering and reinventing them in his studio, giving new life to the strong colors, exaggerated forms and expressive faces of the people and things that he had observed in the religious art and the popular commercial prints that were a natural part of his life as a child and a young man in Medelln.
The intersection of the popular and ”high” in art has been critically important to the various discourses of modernity, from the first decades of the twentieth century onward. Botero has engaged in these dialogues between the popular and the elevated, discovering in both aspects that would form critical components of his distinct form of expression. Fernando Botero’s self-identification as a man and an artist from and of Colombia is the single most outstanding characteristic of his art.
In fact, one could cite works in virtually every genre and analyze them according to the specifically Colombian elements present in them. We have seen already how in his religious compositions, such as Our Lady of Colombia, the flag connotes national identity. Banners with the national colors rise from the Virgin’s feet, and the Christ Child holds a tiny Colombian flag. National flags make their appearance in many other works by the artist, and there are numerous instances in which the national colors are introduced in more subtle ways. In the 1989 Man with a Dog, for example, the sitter stands within the courtyard of a colonial house of the type that could easily be seen in any village or town in Colombia – or in the colonial district of Bogota known as La Candelaria.
Its tiled roof, green woodwork and banana trees instantly locate us within a specific ambience. Yet when we further observe the man’s clothing, we realize that his shirt and tie echo the red, yellow and blue of the Colombian flag. In the 1983 painting entitled La Colombiana (Colombiana Woman), a woman in a yellow dress stands just inside the door of a house which could also be located anywhere in the country. Her voluminous red hair is piled high on her head. Hands with perfectly manicured nails painted red hold a cigarette and a cigarette box, seemingly offering one to the viewer. Over her left ear there is a tiny bow which also bears the red, yellow and blue colors.
While not creating individualized portraits, the artist is instead fashioning a picture of a national – or a national ‘type’ – which is as alive in his imagination and as representative of Colombia as any famous political, artistic or literary superstar. Even in his images of significant historical individuals as well as in his artistic paraphrases, Botero will include seemingly incongruous references to Colombia. In the 1990 canvases of Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI , the eighteenth-century French monarchs stand outside a house on a typical Colombian village street. A tiny green bird perches on the hand of Marie Antoinette, and both of the rulers are flanked by Colombian flags, which also serve to frame the scene, and suggest that the pictures might represent theatrical performances.
It is, however, the timeless and endlessly repetitive life of the small towns of the interior of the country that provide immeasurable fascination for Botero. Although he grew up in Medellin, he and his family would spend parts of the summers in a village at some distance from the city. This place, El Escorial, remains today fairly similar to its aspect of the 1930s. In many of his paintings Botero recalls both the mundane and the extraordinary events of life in such a town. In a painting such as the 1995 House, a woman stands in her doorway observing the passing scene. Nothing seems to change, but we know that any instant something amazing – wonderful or horrifying – could happen. In a 1994 composition we observe just such an occurrence.
The Woman Falling from a Balcony portrays a young woman, dressed only in a green slip and green highheeled shoes, flying through the air as she is observed by a man standing below. Does this represent a terrible accident, a suicide or a vision of the observer? We can only know the ultimate outcome in our imaginations. In paintings such as this Botero seems to be creating visual analogues to the extraordinary imagination of Gabriel Garca Mrquez who, in his novels and short stories, has created a world that may be described as both banal and wondrous. The imagination of the painter, like that of the writer, conjures up fantastical happenings in village settings in which, seemingly, little or nothing changes throughout the years.
