Fernando Botero: The Praise of Opulence
(Jose Maria Faerna)
|
"One day I made a drawing of a
mandolin and, by mistake, I traced a minuscule dot in lieu of the
sound hole, . . . which made the instrument look swollen and massive,"
thus Fernando Botero described the genesis of his distinctive,
inflated style. This was not the discovery of the Colombian artist's
preference for massive forms, as he had had a similar realization a
few years earlier while studying the paintings of Piero della
Francesca. The mandolin episode, however, was a pivotal moment in
Botero's artistic career. Extreme deformation has since become the
hallmark of his figures. In fact, this trait is at times so powerful
that it has been known to eclipse other aspects of his work.
A Plastic World
Some critics, who see Botero as the
standard-bearer of a new model of human beauty, have approached his
paintings with such enthusiasm that it has proved harmful to an
accurate understanding of his work. Artistic qualities of his painting
aside, these apologists have praised the artist's dauntless
confrontation of a society obsessed with thinness. The smug bodies in
Botero's pictures could be seen as alternatives to the anorexic
paradigm favored by much of contemporary culture. This
oversimplification ignores the real intentions of the artist, who does
not seek to comment on trends set by the modern world. Instead, Botero
chooses certain motifs based strictly upon their formal possibilities.
At the same time, he aspires to endow them with a sort of beauty that
operates exclusively within the confines of the artistic realm. As the
Peruvian writer Vargas Llosa once observed, the excessive anatomies
are not degraded versions, rather, they are refinements of real beings
in flesh and blood; they are "plastic beings, denizens of a fully
autonomous world of forms and colors."
Botero's Classicism
As a connoisseur of art history,
Botero traced the archetypes of his style in examples from the past.
He discovered that in the history of ancient sculpture, the periods of
artistic maturity—Egypt's Old Kingdom or fifth-century Greece, for
instance—coincided with an exaltation of volumes and the portrayal of
little emotion. So too in painting, Botero found similar traits in the
monumental and hieratic figures of Giotto, Uccello, Ingres, and Piero
della Francesca. Ever since observing a reproduction of The Meeting
of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba by Piero della Francesca in the
window of a bookstore in Madrid, he has been a constant reference in
Botero's work.
When he was in Florence the
Colombian artist embraced Bernard Berenson's ideas—collected in
Italian Painters of the Renaissance— concerning what the art
historian referred to as "the tactile values" of painting. Botero
strove to elicit similar tactile sensations, which he observed in the
artistic heritage of Pre-Columbian civilizations, as well as in the
works of Mexican muralists such as Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros. In
doing so, he freely altered the proportions of his figures, convinced
that distortion is the essence of art, even in its most classic
expressions. Alongside these archetypal underpinnings drawn from
diverse reaches in the history of art, there are other, more
indefinite forces that may help to further explain Botero's
distinctive artistic development. Perhaps it was the influence of
Colombia's natural exuberance—a land conducive to a certain degree of
excessiveness—as described in the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Maybe this consistent abundance was the artist's attempt to fulfill
his childhood dream of being "bigger, sturdier, physically more
important."
The Figurative Challenge
Even in an era often dominated by
abstraction and the starkest forms of conceptualism, Botero remains
solely in the domain of figurative art. With a few exceptions of works
executed early in his career, Botero's pictures are highly polished,
without the slightest trace of the artist's gestural brushstrokes. In
constructing his images, however, he proceeds in a manner similar to
that of an abstract painter, heeding only the demands of color and
form. This translates into an expansion of volumes and the
modification of the relative size and variety of the compositional
elements. The common inclusion of snakes, flies, birds, and other
seemingly incongruous figures has erroneously been regarded as
evidence of the artist's allegorical intentions, or of certain fickle
surrealist ambitions. The painter defends the purely formal aspects of
his work, insisting that he only uses these figures to introduce
various colors and shapes into his compositions. At the same time,
Botero does not deny the presence of a satirical vein in some of his
paintings, most typically in those works dealing with politics or the
clergy. His is an invariably benign satire that, in the physical
execution of the painting, naturally fades into the background.
Consistency
Few artists have been able to create
a world as subjective and altogether distinctive as Botero's. Relying
resolvedly on his independently formed beliefs, the painter proceeded
to lay the foundations of his own plastic idiom, which have remained
consistent for several decades. Even throughout the most difficult
periods in his life—when anARTneivs critic described his
figures as "fetuses begotten by Mussolini on an idiot peasant woman"
or after the death of his young son, for example—Botero's work has
retained its characteristic sage ingenuousness, as well as its
inherent contentment and opulence.
|
Fernando Botero
b. 1932
|
Although Botero has lived in a wide
array of places, his Colombian homeland plays a consistent and crucial
role in his work. He was born in 1932 in Medellin, a city located in
the heart of the Antioquia province. The artist spent his early years
in this region characterized by its precipitous terrain, which is
intersected by the spurs and foothills of the Andes, and furrowed by
hard-to-reach valleys. The young man's restless nature and artistic
inclinations clashed with his provincial surroundings. A revealing
episode from those years is Botero's expulsion from high school
following the publication in the local newspaper of his article
entitled "Picasso and Non-Conformity in Art." His discussion of the
importance of distortion in Picasso's works was deemed obscene by the
local authorities, who had already reprimanded Botero for previously
publishing some of his own drawings of nudes.
First Steps
Expulsion from school and the
attendant suspension of his scholarship forced Botero to continue his
studies in the nearby town of Marinilla, where he supported himself by
illustrating a number of periodicals and designing theater sets. In
the early 1950s, after completing his studies Botero moved to Bogota,
where he consorted with the cream of the Colombian intelligencija.
Within a few months of his arrival in the capital city, and soon
after his nineteenth birthday, Botero had his first solo show. With
the sale of several works he was able to afford a short stay in the
Caribbean town of Tolu. The few months he spent there were devoted
almost entirely to painting. The following year Botero held a second
solo show, in which he exhibited works executed in Tolu and in the
months immediately thereafter. This group of paintings, heavily
influenced by Gauguin, as well as the early works of Picasso, sold
extremely well. This income along with money from a painting award
enabled Botero to fulfill his dream of traveling to Europe.
The European Dream
Botero arrived in Barcelona in the
summer of 1952. The painter, whose knowledge of modern art was limited
to reproductions he had seen printed in books, was quite disappointed
by the scarcity of actual works available to him in the Catalan city.
He soon moved to Madrid, where he would reside for several months. In
the Spanish capital Botero enrolled in the Academia San Fernando. When
he was not attending classes he often visited the Museo del Prado,
attracted by its collection of works by Velazquez and Goya. From
Madrid he moved to Paris, where, feeling an increasing sense of
kinship with the old masters and evermore estranged from avant-garde
styles, Botero went to few museums other than the Louvre. At the end
of the summer of 1953, after his brief sojourn in the French capital,
he settled in Florence and enrolled in the Fine Arts Academy of San
Marco to learn fresco painting techniques. His stay lasted more than
two years and it proved to be the most important period of his
artistic training. This formative stage was crucial in several
respects. Not only was Botero able to observe firsthand the creations
of Giotto and the Renaissance masters, he
also profited greatly from his
teacher, Roberto Longhi, as well as from the writings of Bernard
Berenson.
The Two Americas
After his enriching experiences in
Italy, Botero's return to Colombia resulted in a bitter homecoming.
The exhibition in Bogota of the works he had painted in Europe was a
complete failure; he did not sell a single picture. At the outset of
1956, in the aftermath of this harsh disappointment, the artist left
Colombia and established residence in Mexico City with his new wife,
Gloria Zea. It was there that the celebrated mandolin episode took
place, and under the influence of Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros—the
great muralists he had admired throughout his earliest Colombian
phase—Botero began to develop his distinctive style of overblown
forms. That same year, his work was shown for the first time in the
United States, and his success began to grow. At age twenty-six,
Botero was appointed professor of painting at the Art Academy of
Bogota, and his pictures continued to attract an increasing number of
buyers. This was, however, a difficult period for Botero in both his
personal life and his career. In 1960 he began renting a small
apartment in New York City while finalizing his divorce from Gloria
Zea. At the same time, he endured the unequivocal hostility of art
critics and his New York colleagues who, for the most part, belonged
to the Abstract Expressionist school. The turning point in Botero's
career came in 1961 when Dorothy Miller, then curator of museum
collections at The Museum of Modern Art in New York bought his Mona
Lisa, Age Tkvelve.
Recognition
This purchase brought the definitive
consolidation of the artist's fame. In the mid-1960s, the ocher tones
and heavy brushwork of his previous paintings made way for a new
style, with polished surfaces and more vivid colors, characteristic of
his mature works. For the next several years Botero resided
alternately in Colombia, Europe, and New York. In 1970 his son Pedro
was born to his second wife, Cecilia Zambrano. In a tragic car
accident just four years later, the child died and the painter
suffered severe injuries.
In the ensuing years, sculpture came
to occupy an increasingly important place in Botero's career. He took
up residence in 1983 in Pietrasanta, a Tuscan-town famous for its
foundries and numerous marble quarries. On account of this growing
emphasis on sculpture, he began spending several months each year in
Italy. For Botero, this was a time of renewed and intense activity in
both sculpture and painting, the latter frequently depicting
bullfighting themes. These works were well received and soon
translated into an uninterrupted series of exhibitions. The
wide-ranging retrospective of his work, held at the Hirshhorn Museum
and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., in 1979, was the first in a
series of similar shows. Subsequent exhibitions were held in Chicago,
New York, and Madrid. Neither the fame nor the high prices fetched by
his works has changed Botero's nomadic habits. To this day, the artist
continues to divide his time between Colombia, New York, Paris, and
Pietrasanta.
|
Self-Portraits
|
For the most part, Botero's forays
into portraiture have taken the form of self-portraits, in which he
subjects his own figure to the same deforming logic that he applies to
all others. He does so with a good amount of humor, especially when
echoing such illustrious antecedents as Rembrandt or de Chirico. He
portrays himself disguised as some of the most diverse
characters—projections, perhaps, of his unfulfilled desires—ranging
from Spanish conquistador to gallant bullfighter. In some instances,
the Colombian artist portrays himself as a tiny figure, somewhere
between the medieval representation of the donor, and the
self-portraits of Velazquez depicted alongside his eminent models. In
other instances, however, Botero's presence is rendered almost
imperceptible, as his distinctive visage timidly emerges from some
minuscule cameo.
|
Self-Portrait the Day
of My First Communion
1970
|
Self-Portrait with
Model
1989
|
Self-Portrait with
Sofia
1986
|
Self-Portrait
1994
|
Self Portrait
|
Paraphrases
|
One of the most distinctive chapters
in Botero's career is the one comprising his renderings of celebrated
paintings from the history of art. Like Picasso and Bacon, the
Colombian painter borrows motifs from a shared cultural heritage.
Botero's intention, however, is not to copy Leonardo, Caravaggio, or
Mantegna, since his pictures are free interpretations retaining only
the subject matter of the originals. By stripping the motifs of all
their stylistic traits he converts them into genuine Boteros. Although
a certain touch of irony infiltrates these works, the artist's goal is
not to create caricatures. Rather, they are his attempts to distill
the true essences of paintings while conforming to the formal aspects
of his particular style. The artist has practiced reworking art from
the past since executing copies of paintings by Velazquez at the Prado,
or when attending fresco classes in Florence.
|
Mona Lisa, Age Twelve
1959
|
Mona Lisa
1978
|
Menina (after
Velazquez)
1978
|
Rubens and his Wife
1965
|
Marie Antoinette
1990
|
Louis XVI
1990
|
Saint Michael
1986
|
Después de Piero della Francesca
|
Después de Pierro della Francesca
|
Rapto de Europa
|
Rapto de Europa
|
|
