At a time when slimness is a standard of seduction, there’s one artist who finds happiness only in curves and generous forms. We’re talking about Fernando Botero, the world’s most highly-rated Latin American painter and sculptor, and one of the few to be recognized in his own lifetime for his distinctive style, which is dissociable from any artistic movement
Colombia, cradle of his art
Fernando Botero, or as he calls himself, the most Colombian of Colombian artists, was born on April 19, 1932 in Medellín, Colombia. His youth was marked by the premature death of his father and the presence of his uncle, a bullfighting enthusiast, who enrolled him in a bullfighting school in 1944, where he stayed for two years.
After this painful experience, Fernando Botero took courses in art history and discovered European painters such as Pablo Picasso. In 1948, his drawings and writings on « Picasso and non-conformism in art » were published in the Sunday supplement of El Colombiano, which led to his expulsion from the school in 1949
Travel shapes his art
In 1951, he moved to Bogotá, where he rubbed shoulders with artists, writers and intellectuals. It was here that he exhibited his work for the first time and enjoyed his first successes, while the money he earned from his exhibitions enabled him to undertake his first trip to Europe. Between 1952 and 1955, he travelled through Spain (Madrid and Barcelona), France (Paris), where he found the inspiration that would form the basis of his style, and Italy, which he criss-crossed on his scooter.
He also let himself be guided by the works of Diego Velasquez and Francisco de Goya, by the masters of the Louvre museum and by Italian Renaissance art or oil painting… He was also influenced by pre-Columbian art and the works of Mexican muralists such as Diego Rivera.
The mandolin, the triggering instrument
In 1955, he returned to Bogotá, Colombia, and in 1957 established his reputation once and for all with « Nature morte à la mandoline » (« Still life with mandolin »). The « Botérien » style was born! All it took was a small hole in the top of the mandolin for the artist to make a name for himself. The Botero universe then took on its full dimension: « I had always tried to render the monumental in my work. One day, after a lot of work, I picked up a pencil at random and drew a mandolin with very ample shapes, as I always did. But when it came to drawing the hole in the middle of the instrument, I made it much smaller, and suddenly the mandolin took on proportions of extraordinary monumentality… »
Boterian style rewarded
With a pinch of irony and ingenuity, in each of his paintings Botero explodes shapes, thighs, arms, cheeks… Characters swell, dresses puff out, instruments lose their sense of proportion. Botero seduces with the shimmering colors and playful, disproportionate forms of his works, winning one award after another: at the Salon des Artistes Colombiens in 1958 with his painting « La alcoba nupcial » (The Bridal Chamber), the Guggenheim International Award for Colombia in 1960 with his work « La Bataille de l’archi-diable » (The Battle of the Archdiable), the prize at the Salon Intercol des Jeunes Artistes of the Bogotá Museum of Modern Arts in 1964 with his painting « Pommes » (Apples)
Botero paints the world
Still lifes, female nudes, family portraits, bullfighting and Colombian society are recurrent themes in his work. His native Medellín has strongly influenced his choice of colors and forms in the world he paints. Through his art, Botero also expresses his indignation at the violent scenes in Colombia and the torture inflicted on prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
Following a bomb attack in 1995 in a Medellin park (a bomb exploded near his sculpture « The Bird »), Fernando Botero placed a replica next to the wreckage as a symbol of peace. The artist also reproduces famous paintings such as Mona Lisa, a caricature of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Infanta Margarita from Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas, and Piero della Francesca’s Federico da Montefeltro.
Botero, a generous artist
From the 70s onwards, he travelled back and forth between Colombia, New York and Europe. In 1969, he exhibited for the first time in Paris. It was also in the French capital that he created his first sculptures: Botero transposed his universe from canvas to marble. Such was his passion that he devoted himself almost exclusively to this medium from 1976 to 1977. In marble, Botero succeeds in expressing excess and opulence, or as he puts it, « a poetic alternative to reality ». His 1992 exhibition on the Avenue des Champs-Elysées in Paris will certainly come to mind. His sculptures also toured the world: New York, Lisbon, Paris, Munich, Singapore… In 1979, Botero’s works were declared a heritage of national interest. In 1983, bullfighting made a major comeback in the artist’s paintings, which toured several European cities and even the world (Japan and Venezuela).
Today, a museum in Bogotá is dedicated to him, with 123 of his creations and 85 works by other artists such as Auguste Renoir, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Salvador Dali, Marc Chagall, Max Beckmann, Pierre Bonnard… But it is the Museum of Antioquia that holds the largest number of works by the artist: it donated 187 works (paintings, drawings and sculptures) in 2012.
A prolific artist, Fernando Botero celebrated his 80th birthday in 2012, with over 3,000 paintings and 300 sculptures to his credit
And finally..
One recognizes Botero as one recognizes a Van Gogh painting, a kind of DNA that only the greatest leave to art history (quote from contacttv.net). According to arteseleccion.com, he is the most illustrious representative of twentieth-century Mestizo culture in Europe and America. A major artist, not to be missed during a stay in Colombia
Text by Emmanuelle Poiret
