Fernando Botero: life, characteristics and most important works

Fernando Botero is a Colombian plastic artist who enjoys the highest international recognition. He is often known as "the painter of fat women", but far from what most believe, Botero has no interest in representing "fat." On the other hand, he does have it in developing to the last consequences the plastic value of the volume, the main point of his proposal.

Although today he has come to be considered an avant-garde painter, in the beginning his figurative style was a cause for rejection. This is explained by the fact that towards the middle of the 20th century the artistic world was moved by conceptual art. Some have classified his style as naive, others as neo-figurativism and even as magical realism.

In any case, for Botero, the volume will be reviewed, studied and developed in any aspect to represent, whether it is a human body, an animal or an object. For this reason, his work has no thematic limitations and covers all kinds of genres.

Indeed, the Cultural Network of the Bank of the Republic of Colombia reports that, on the occasion of an exhibition made by Botero in 1979, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington classified his work into six categories themes:

1. Religion (biblical scenes, portraits of saints, clerical personalities, and mythology);
2. The great masters (references and versions of Leonardo da Vinci, Jan van Eyck, Diego Velázquez, etc.);
3. Still and living lifes;
4. The nudes and sexual customs;
5. Political personalities and, finally,
6. Real and imaginary people, including genre painting (pictures of customs and daily life).

Throughout his career, scenes of social criticism also appeared, very especially referred to to Latin American tensions, and bullfighting, turned into an authentic line of representation.

Let us then see the most significant works of this painter who still surprises us with his most recent productions.

1. The camera degli sposi (tribute to Andrea Mantegna II)

Fernando Botero presented this work at the XI National Salon of Colombian Artists in 1958. The first reaction of the jury was to reject the piece outright, considering it, among other things, an offense against artistic tradition. Botero makes a synthesis of the plastic values ​​of Mantegna most revealing for him, and also reduces the composition to strictly familiar characters. To do this, it also completely removes the air from the space.

However, Marta Traba saw in this work the germ of a new look that was worth sharing. Very soon, the influence of this researcher would change things: the work, previously rejected, rose with the first place in the room. To this end, Marta Traba wrote years later in Time (Bogotá, D.E., April 27, 1966):

... the creative sense was rewarded for the first time, art was stimulated as a total adventure, it left the insignificant replica of reality, logical vision was deformed with the addition of fantasy, mockery, the noisy weight of shapes".

2. Dead bishops

Botero ironizes about the power held in life and death as a final destination that pulverizes that power. The painter piles up a series of bodies of bishops dressed in his robes and attributes of power, but these lie like on a mountain, one on top of the other. According to the sources consulted, this is a recurring element in Colombian painting. The picture can be related to the arrival of the National Front in 1958, when the Catholic Church began to lose its political influence in the country.

3. Lunch with Ingres and Piero della Francesca

This was another of the author's emblematic pieces. The treatment of volume is observed not only in the characters but also in the objects they use. Food, therefore, also takes center stage. Botero represents not reality, but an imagined reality: on the left we have a self-portrait of Botero, dressed in a striped suit with a tie. With him they share the table Piero della Francesca (left), painter of the Intalian Renaissance; at the center of the scene, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, a French painter of the neoclassical period.

4. The Arnolfini marriage

Fernando Botero has painted more than one version of this painting. Such has been his obsession with the most emblematic work of the Flemish painter Jan van Eyck.

Botero valued van Eyck's way of withdrawing his emotions or his judgments in the representation of the scene. He also liked the way he treated geometric values ​​and volume.

5. Still life with watermelon

In this work he is part of the group of still lifes or living natures. The elements of gigantism applied to the characteristic objects of a still life or still life are observed. The irony is in the representation of an object that is already voluminous, like watermelon, or already round, like oranges, applying the principles of the Boterian technique.

6. Serie Boterosutra

This piece by Botero is part of a collection of erotic art called Boterosutra. It is one of the most recent works of the painter, and addresses for the first time in the history of Colombian art, the artistic representation of the sexual experience between lovers. The series is made up of about 70 small-format pieces made in different techniques such as color drawings, black and white drawings, watercolors and brushstrokes.

7. The presidential family

The presidential family It is one of the most emblematic paintings of the Colombian artist. It is part of the group of political personalities. In this painting Botero represents the presidential family, but also adds some elements that are a reference to the work Las Meninas by Velázquez. The prelate on the right hand and, on the left, behind a canvas whose content is hidden from the viewer, is Botero himself painting the scene.

8. The musicians

This painting can be framed in the group of the subjects of real or imaginary people, that is to say, in the genre scenes. Botero represents in him a band of musicians with a singer, among whom a festive spirit dominates.

As is typical of Botero's painting, there is little space for air between each figure. All are accumulated towards the center of the composition. The difference in scales between the musicians and the singer ends up outlining a humorous and grotesque tone at the same time.

9. The Tortures of Abu Ghrabi

In 2005, Fernando Botero produced a series of more than 70 canvases in which he openly criticizes the violence of the US government in Iraq, when the regrettable torture of Abu Ghraib. Even so, Botero does not feel that it is a political position, but rather a gesture to release the indignation that such news caused him.

The series recalls the Spanish Francisco de Goya, and his famous series of engravings The disasters of war. It also recalls the monumentality and political commitment of Mexican Muralism.

See also 5 keys to understanding the importance of Mexican muralism.

10. The goring

One of the recurring themes in Botero's work is bullfighting. In fact, according to some sources, before being a painter Botero had an interest in bullfighting life and, in fact, it was through this that he discovered his passion for painting. In this painting, drawn up in 1988, we see the exact moment when the bull goring the bullfighter. In the face of the bull you can see the gestures of satisfaction.

11. Adam

Botero also stands out in sculpture, to which he deliberately manages to bring the elements of plastic representation developed in his painting. In this case, Botero surprises us with the representation of Adam that, instead of being exposed from the religious narrative, is exposed as a paradigmatic concept of patriarchy. Adam dominates over Eve whom he literally keeps at her feet, while she lifts the child up like a trophy. He highlights the volume and gigantism of the proportions in the body mass of the characters, with the barely present member of Adam.

12. The kiss of Judas

Between 2010 and 2011 Fernando Botero worked on the series Way of the Cross, made up of a total of 40 oil paintings on canvas and 35 drawings on paper, of which he donated 27 oil paintings and 34 drawings to the Museum of Antioquia in Medellín.

Botero takes up the representation of biblical scenes in the context of non-liturgical art, a pictorial tradition that he had diminished since the 19th century, except for honorable exceptions.

On the canvas you can see the moment when Judas appears with the Sadducees and the guard to take Jesus prisoner. Judas is represented with greenish skin, probably a sign of the death that he carries; likewise, he exhibits a clothing of the present time (pants, belt and rolled-up shirt). On his left hand, a wristwatch is seen. In the right corner of the painting, Botero is included in the scene on a lower scale and, dressed in a modern suit, his finger points to the action.

Fernando Botero

Fernando Botero is a painter, draftsman and sculptor born in Colombia in 1932. He worked as an illustrator in the newspaper The Colombian from 15 years of age.

He was awarded at the Salón de Artistas Colombianos, and with the prize money, he paid for his trip to Europe. Indeed, Botero has lived many years outside of Colombia. He has alternately fixed his residence in the United States, Europe (France, Spain and Italy), Latin America and Asia.

Although he perceives himself as self-taught for not having consistently embraced a system of training, he studied at the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid and at the Academia de San Marcos in Florence He was a scholar of the art of the Italian Quattrocento. He was also a deep admirer of Mexican muralism, from which he inherited his taste for monumentality.

His work revolves around a certain plastic value: volume treatment. Through his proposal, Botero questions academicism although he values ​​the pictorial tradition. At the same time, he addresses everyday life, social criticism, art history and religiosity, through resources such as irony, gigantism, humor, the projection of a different reality, innocence and satire.