by Stephen Kinzer with Ashley Shannon Wu
[Colombian artist Fernando Botero died on Friday, 15 September 2023, in a hospital in Monaco. He was 91 and the cause was reported as complications of pneumonia. His obituary appeared in the New York Times the next day, 16 September 2023 (updated online on 17 September). I’ve posted the notice below, followed by some personal remarks about the artist.]
His voluptuous figures, both in paintings and in sculpture, portrayed the high and mighty as well as everyday people through an enlarging prism.
Fernando Botero, the Colombian whose voluptuous pictures and sculptures of overstuffed generals, bishops, prostitutes, housewives and other products of his whimsical imagination made him one of the world’s best-known artists, died on Friday in Monaco. He was 91.
His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by a close friend, Mauricio Vallejo, a co-owner of an art gallery in Houston, who said the cause was complications of pneumonia. President Gustavo Petro of Colombia earlier announced the death on social media.
As a young artist, Mr. Botero developed an instantly recognizable style and enjoyed great and immediate commercial success. Fans sought his autograph and were known to wait for him at airports.
“‘It’s the profession you do if you wish to die of hunger,’ people used to tell me,” he once recalled. “Yet I was so strongly impelled to take it up that I never thought about the consequences.”
Mr. Botero was permanently associated with the florid, rounded figures that filled his pictures. He portrayed middle-class life and bordellos, clerics and peasants, bulging baskets of fruit and the grim effects of violence.
Fernando Botero Angulo was born on April 19, 1932, in the Colombian city of Medellín. His father died when he was a child. An uncle enrolled him in a Jesuit high school, encouraged his artistic interests and supported him for two years as he studied to be a matador. Bullfighting scenes figure in some of his earliest work, and he followed bullfighting all his life.
After publishing an article titled “Pablo Picasso and Nonconformity in Art,” Mr. Botero was expelled from his Jesuit school because it expressed ideas said to be “irreligious.” Among his early influences were Cubism, Mexican murals and the pinup art of Alberto Vargas, whose “Vargas girl” drawings he saw in Esquire magazine.
He began publishing illustrations in a local newspaper while still a teenager, worked as a set designer and in 1951 moved to Bogotá, the capital. After his first one-man show there, he moved to Paris and spent several years living there and in Florence, Italy.
In 1961, the New York curator Dorothy Miller bought a Botero work, “Mona Lisa, Age Twelve,” for the Museum of Modern Art. It was a surprising choice, since Abstract Expressionism was then the rage, and Mr. Botero’s sketchy portrait of a chubby-cheeked child seemed out of place.
The Modern’s attention to his work helped set Mr. Botero on a path to renown. In 1979, he was the subject of a retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington. Many of his pictures were of corpulent figures poised between caricature and pathos.
“A perfect woman in art can prove banal in reality, like a photograph in Playboy,” Mr. Botero reasoned. “The most beautiful women in art, like Mona Lisa herself, were ugly in real life. There are those who see the monstrous in my work, but my work is what it is.”
One review of the Hirshhorn show was headlined “Botero, One Hundred Thousand Dollars for a Painting by Him in Washington.” That reflected the view of some critics that Mr. Botero’s work was banal, self-referential and out of touch with vibrant currents in contemporary art.
“The critics have always written with rage and fury about me, all my life,” Mr. Botero groused.
Writing in The London Evening Standard in 2009, the arts writer Godfrey Barker marveled, “Wow, do they loathe him.”
“The high priests of contemporary art in London and New York cannot stand him because he defies everything they believe in,” Mr. Barker wrote. “They hate him more because he is rich, an immense commercial success, easy on the eye, and very popular with ordinary folk.”
Mr. Botero and his first wife, Gloria Zea, who became Colombia’s minister of culture, divorced in 1960 after having three children: Fernando, Lina, and Juan Carlos. He spent much of the next decade and a half living in New York. Ms. Zea died in 2019. He was married two other times, to Cecilia Zambrano and, in 1978, to Sophia Vari, a Greek painter and sculptor. Ms. Vari died in May.
He is survived by his three children from his first marriage as well as a brother, Rodrigo, and grandchildren.
Two misfortunes marked Mr. Botero’s family life. In the 1970s, his 5-year-old son, Pedro, from his second marriage, was killed in a car crash in which Mr. Botero was injured. His son Fernando Botero Zea, who had become a politician in Colombia and rose to minister of defense, served 30 months in prison after being convicted in a corruption scandal.
It was during the 1970s that Mr. Botero’s interest in form led him to sculpture. His sculptures, many depicting florid, whimsical large people, brought him a new level of public visibility. Major cities clamored to place them along main avenues, including, in New York, in the median strips of Park Avenue in 1993. Several are on permanent display in nontraditional spaces ranging from the lobby of the Deutsche Bank Center (formerly the Time Warner Center) in New York to a lounge at the Grand Wailea resort in Hawaii called the Botero Bar.
Mr. Botero was an enthusiastic art collector, and in 2000 he donated part of his collection to a museum in his hometown, Medellín. Some of his works are interpretations of masterpieces by artists like Caravaggio, Titian and van Gogh.
Mr. Botero usually depicted his men of power with at least a touch of irony or satire. Yet, although they may appear foppish or self-important, and nearly all are of exaggerated proportion, he infused them with a measure of dignity.
Jesus was Mr. Botero’s subject in several evocative works. He painted portraits of Delacroix, Ingres and Giacometti. His images of authority, like “Cardinal,” “The English Ambassador,” “The First Lady” and two called “The President,” painted in 1987 and 1989, are gently sympathetic. He brought portly dignity to a man who smoked and a woman who stroked a cat.
Many of his subjects, though, were swollen tapestries of flesh, bursting from the confines of uniforms, dresses and towels unable to cover exaggerated acreage. He insisted that he never painted fat people, saying he wished simply to glorify the sensuality of life.
“I studied the art of Giotto and all other Italian masters,” he once said. “I was fascinated by their sense of volume and monumentality. Of course in modern art everything is exaggerated, so my voluminous figures also became exaggerated.”
Mr. Botero and Ms. Vari maintained homes in Paris and Pietrasanta, Italy, where an exhibition was held to mark his 80th birthday in 2012.
Some who considered Mr. Botero’s art to be essentially playful and lighthearted were surprised when, in 2005, he produced a series of graphic paintings based on photographs of prisoners abused at the American jail in Abu Ghraib, Iraq.
“These works are the result of the indignation that the violations in Iraq produced in me and the rest of the world,” he said.
The New York Times art critic Roberta Smith wrote that the Abu Ghraib paintings “restore the prisoners’ dignity and humanity without diminishing their agony or the injustice of their situation.” The novelist and critic Erica Jong called them “astonishing” and asserted that they argued for “a complete revision of whatever we previously thought of Botero’s work.”
“When we think about the Colombian artist Fernando Botero, most of us visualize his roly-poly people flaunting their fat, their fashionable headgear, their cigarettes and cigarette holders, their excess,” Ms. Jong wrote. “I never thought of these as political images until I saw Botero’s Abu Ghraib series." Now, she added, “I see all Botero’s work as a record of the brutality of the haves against the have-nots.”
Mr. Botero had dealt with political themes before, notably the Colombian drug trade, but he always returned to more calming projects afterward. Following the Abu Ghraib series, he produced a series of circus pictures and then rediscovered his longtime love of still life.
“After all this time,” he said in 2010, “I always return to the simplest things.”
[Stephen Kinzer is an author, journalist, and academic. A former New York Times foreign correspondent, he’s published several books, and writes for several newspapers and news agencies, including the New York Review of Books, the Guardian, and the Boston Globe; he left the Times in 2005. He’s a senior fellow in international affairs and diplomacy at the Watson Institute.
[The Colombian painter and sculptor Fernando Botero is an artist in whom I’m especially interested. My first exposure to Botero’s paintings was when I was 11. I thought his work was grotesque (though I don’t think I’d have come up with that word at the time) and disturbing.
[Two years later, when my mother bought one of Botero’s paintings as a birthday gift for my father, I wasn’t sure I could live in a house with it on the wall. I did, however, and it happily remained in my parents’ homes for the rest of their lives.
[In September 1958, my father bought a part ownership in the Gres Gallery in Washington, a respected venue for contemporary one-artist and theme shows (see “Gres Gallery,” posted on Rick On Theater on 7, 10, and 13 July 2018). From 29 October to 25 November of that year, Gres mounted Fernando Botero, becoming only the second—and the first commercial—gallery in the U.S. to put up a one-man show of Fernando Botero’s work. (The first was at the Pan-American Union, now the Organization of American States, or OAS, in April and May 1957.)
[Ambassador José Gutiérrez Gómez of Colombia officiated at the opening, which made the scene that much more impressive, especially for an 11-year-old boy. The diplomat had given a reception at his embassy the day before in honor of the painter, who would become arguably the most famous of all the artists Gres showed.
[Between 18 October and 12 November 1960, Gres had its second solo show for the Colombian artist, Fernando Botero: One-Man Show. It was from this exhibit that my mother (with moral support from my brother and me—though, of course, at not yet 12 and a month shy of 14, we didn’t really contribute any cash to the purchase as we didn’t have any) bought Boy with a Guitar. (Botero’s Mona Lisa, Age Twelve was exhibited at this Gres Gallery show as well, and it’s my recollection that the Museum of Modern Art bought it there.)
[After that, Botero was one
of the artists we paid attention to as his career and reputation blossomed and
he became an internationally known and respected artist. We read and clipped articles on him and went
to exhibits of his work in galleries, museums, and public spaces.
[When my parents came to New York City to visit me and we’d go to an art show or just wander around one of Manhattan’s gallery centers, we’d frequently make a stop at the Marlborough Fine Arts on W. 57th Street, which handles Botero’s work, just to see what was on view.
[On one particular visit, there was a wonderful bronze sculpture of a dove, a frequent subject of the artist’s, perhaps a little over life-sized, sitting on a six-foot perch. I think it was going for $35,000 (about $100K today), lightyears out of my price range—but I kept lying to myself, ‘I can come up with that somehow. I should do it. I have a perfect spot for it in my living room!’
[I didn’t, of course. More’s the pity! (I just wouldn’t have eaten for a couple of years.)
[On that same trip, we walked up Madison Avenue for several blocks, “window shopping.” In almost every gallery, there was at least one Botero sculptures in the window. In one shop, we could see a full-scale bronze dinner table set for a meal—all cast in bronze. We had to go in and see it.
[Over his lifetime, Botero donated hundreds of pieces to cities, museums, and public spaces all around the world. When on a visit to Puerto Rico in 2008, I spotted what I was sure was such a piece in the Plaza de la Cultura on Avenida José de Diego in San Juan across from the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico. When I asked in the art museum if that was a Botero, no one knew—even though it was right across the street! It turned out to be Reclining Woman (Mujer reclinada, 2006) which the artist had given to the people of the city.
[In 1993, 14 of Botero's monumental, voluptuous bronze sculptures of people and animals (Botero in New York) were exhibited for about 2½ months along the grassy median strip of Park Avenue from 54th up to 61st Streets (about a third of a mile). The gigantic bronzes, portraying men, women, children, birds, and cats, remained on display from 5 September to 14 November. Parents brought their children, who sat on the grass of the medians and sketched the bulbous figures. Some even clambered atop the statues, which I recall was encouraged.
[In November 2007, I went to D.C. to visit my mother and we went to the nearby American University Museum to see Fernando Botero: Abu Ghraib (see my report posted on 26 November 2017), the artists series of paintings depicting the abuses visited upon Iraqi prisoners by their American guards as revealed by the photos that were released in April 2004. This was Mom’s second visit to the exhibit as she’d gone to the opening because Botero was there.]
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