Fernando Botero

Painter and sculptor

• Born: April 19, 1932
• Place of Birth: Place of birth: Medellin, Colombia
• Died: September 15, 2023
• Place of Death: Monaco, Monaco

Education: Medellin University; studied at San Fernando Academy; studied at Prado Museum

Significance: Colombian artist Fernando Botero’s work was influenced by pre-Colombian art and Spanish colonial works. He was known for creating works in which the subjects were overly large and rounded.

Background

Fernando Botero was born in Medellin, Colombia, on April 19, 1932. He was the middle child in his family. His father, a traveling salesman, died when Botero was four years old. His mother worked as a seamstress to support her three sons. As a boy, Botero attended matador school. He turned his back on bullfighting, however, and instead focused on art. He was an illustrator for a local literary magazine when he was sixteen. He began exhibiting his paintings the same year. When he was about eighteen, he had his first solo show in Bogota. Botero’s early influences included Diego Velázquez (1599–1660), Francisco de Goya (1746–1828), and Diego Rivera (1886–1957). Botero also worked as a set designer in Bogota.

Within a few years Botero was in Madrid, Spain, where he studied painting at the San Fernando Academy and the Prado Museum. He earned money by copying paintings in Spain’s national art museum. He sold these copies to tourists. The young man also traveled around Europe, viewing great works of art in France and Italy. In Florence, Italy, he studied art history and learned fresco techniques.

Botero briefly returned to Colombia. In 1960, he won the Guggenheim National Prize for his home country and moved to the United States, where he lived in New York City. During this time, he began to develop a signature style. The figures in his works were often bloated and round and were boldly outlined, much like folk art of Latin America. The colors were bright and flat.

Life’s Work

One of Botero’s early works, The Presidential Family(1967), depicts the elements of the artist’s style at that time. The painting includes men and women as well as a snake and a cat. The president of Colombia, his wife and daughter, and a grandmother appear with a bishop and a general. All of the figures appear inflated, with round faces and bloated limbs. Though this and other works appear to be critical of government authority, Botero had often denied such intentions.

A meeting with the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) Dorothy Miller helped boost Botero’s career. At that time, the predominant popular art was abstraction. As a curator, Miller purchased some of Botero’s work and thereby raised his profile. Botero had a major exhibition, "Inflated Images," at the MoMA in 1969. He also traveled in Europe, where he visited Germany and Italy. He had exhibits in various cities, including Berlin, Germany, and London, England, at this time.

The artist had an exhibit in Paris, France, in 1972. He moved to Paris in 1973. He continued to live and work there through the 1970s. Though previously known for his paintings, in Paris he primarily created oversized sculptures in his signature bloated style. Within two decades, his sculptures began to appear in outdoor exhibitions. His works, both paintings and sculptures, have been exhibited in museums around the world.

Though Botero’s paintings often depict people enjoying themselves, dancing, dining, and drinking, the images frequently have an undercurrent of squalor. The 1980 painting Dancing in Colombia, for example, shows a couple dancing, but cigarette butts and fruits are strewn on the floor. The couple is vastly overshadowed by oversized musicians, who seem uninterested in the dancers.

The artist’s 1986 white marble sculpture Woman Smoking was sold at auction in 2007. It broke a record for his sculptures, bringing $1.6 million for Christie’s. Botero’s bronze sculpture Dancers (2007) broke that record in 2011. It was purchased at auction for $1.7 million. The more than 10-foot-tall sculpture depicts two nudes, a man and a woman, as if poised to begin dancing. The auction house noted that the figures were of equal size and heft, denoting their equal stature. In other works by Botero, one of the figures of a dancing pair is often much smaller than the other. In 2012 the International Sculpture Center in the United States awarded Botero the Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award.

Botero’s later work treads more clearly in political territory. He exhibited drawings and paintings in 2004 that turned a spotlight on issues in Colombia such as the violence caused by drug cartels. The following year, he exhibited a series he called Abu Ghraib. These works deal with 2004 reports from the prison of the same name, where American soldiers abused and humiliated prisoners during the Iraq War. Botero spent fourteen months completing the works in the series, which was first exhibited in Europe.

In his later years, Botero lived in Monte Carlo, Monaco, where he primarily worked. He also had homes in Evia, Paris, and Pietrasanta. Botero died from complications of pneumonia on September 15, 2023, at age 91, in Monaco.

Impact

Botero was known for creating works in which the subjects were overly large and rounded. Much of his work was reminiscent of political cartoons. His style became known as Boterismo. Botero was a painter and a sculptor. His paintings often focus on individuals, though he has also painted landscapes and still-life works. Many of his bronze sculptures depicted human nudes and animals, including birds, cats, and horses. Some of these works included both humans and animals such as women astride horses and birds perched on nudes. His sculptures netted high prices at auction, with several selling for more than $1 million.

Personal Life

Botero was married three times. He married his third wife, Sophia Vari—a Greek artist—in the 1970s. He had several children. A son died in childhood in a car accident.

Bibliography

"Artist’s Giant Bronze ‘Dancers’ Sculpture Fetches $1.7 Million at Auction." Daily Mail, 16 Nov. 2011, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2062300/Colombian-artists-giant-bronze-Dancers-sculpture-fetches-1-7-million-auction.html. Accessed 30 Sept. 2024.

"Dancing in Colombia." Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2024, www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/482698 Accessed 30 Sept. 2024.

"Fernando Botero (Colombian, Born 1932)." Artnet, 2024, www.artnet.com/artists/fernando-botero/. Accessed 30 Sept. 2024.

"Fernando Botero, The Presidential Family, 1967." Museum of Modern Art, 2024, www.moma.org/collection/works/80711Accessed 30 Sept. 2024.

Kinzer, Stephen. “Fernando Botero, Artist of Whimsical Rotundity, Is Dead at 91." The New York Times, 17 Sept. 2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/09/15/arts/fernando-botero-dead.html. Accessed 30 Sept. 2024.