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If you lived in New York City's Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, you might have encountered a tall, dapper Colombian among the hordes of aspiring artists who congregated there. Charming, garrulous and quick to make friends, he might have invited you to his tiny apartment and offered you one of his paintings for a few hundred dollars. He might even have confided that he desperately needed the money to pay the rent. If you stumped up the cash and took the painting home, you're one lucky investor. Works by Fernando Botero from that period are worth about $500,000 these days. "I sold my paintings myself to friends," Botero says. "They would come over after dinner. I was broke."
Talk about a reversal of fortune. Botero is now one of the world's richest and most successful artists. This week, a major retrospective, covering merely the last 15 of his 56 years' work, opens in Rome's Palazzo Venezia, showcasing 170 paintings, drawings and sculptures. The exhibition moves to the Würth Museum in Künzelsau, north of Stuttgart, Germany, in October and to Athens next summer, before heading to the U.S. in late 2006. The exhibition is sure to delight the many devotees of Botero's work, but it's certain to leave other art lovers nonplussed. Some critics regard his work as predictable and shallow — "popular" in the worst sense of the word. Botero admits that people relate more readily to his style than to more abstract or conceptual works, but is proud of that fact. "It communicates very easily with people," he says. So is Botero a great artist, or just a very, very successful one?
Botero's corpulent characters — comical but keenly observed renderings of rotund ballerinas, families and Latin American small-town types like the ladies in The Gardening Club (1997) — are instantly recognizable. Even acknowledged reproductions of his work sell for hundreds of dollars on eBay. Two years ago, the British magazine ArtReview compiled a Top 10 ranking of the most highly valued artists in terms of the total value of sales. Botero came out at No. 5, behind artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg but ahead of Dutch painter Karel Appel and Britain's David Hockney. The editors estimated that Botero's paintings and sculptures had sold over the years for more than $57 million. Although a big chunk of those profits went to collectors, millions have been made by the artist himself. Now 73, Botero says he's lost track of how much he's created: "I've painted every day of my life since I was 17," he says, sitting in his Paris studio one recent morning, the sun flooding the room through the skylight.
Despite, or perhaps because of, his success, Botero is curiously isolated from his peers. He prefers to surround himself with family and nonartist friends. Those artists he has befriended have been from an older generation, "where there was no jealousy," he says. More often, Botero says "it has been difficult to have relations with artists of my generation because I was doing the opposite." Yet most who meet Botero are struck by his huge charm and gregarious personality.
He trained in Europe in the 1950s, and never became part of the abstract or conceptual art movements, instead sticking to the voluminous figurative style he formed in his 20s. Botero says he first became fascinated with "bolometric" shapes while living in Florence in 1953, inspired by Old Masters like Giotto and Botticelli: "I saw that volume gives a sensuality to painting. People say, 'When are you going to do something different?' I say, maybe never. The day I change my convictions is the day I'll do something different. You have to be strong to just follow your convictions and do what you want to do."
That stance has ensured Botero's continuing commercial success but earned him plenty of detractors, who accuse him of endlessly repeating a single well-honed gimmick. While Botero's work appears in museums around the world, he has drawn fire from some contemporary art curators. The Museum of Modern Art (moma) in New York City, for example, does not display the Botero paintings and drawings it owns. Joe La Placa, London-based director of artnet.com, a modern-art database, says that for years Botero was regarded as "an innovator." Now, La Placa believes his current work is "a pale imitation of what he did many years ago." Yet in Latin America, Botero's appeal puts him "in a category all of his own," says Julián Zugazagoitia, director of El Museo del Barrio, a Latin American art museum in New York City.
Criss-crossing the world between his five homes, Botero ships all his work to Zurich to be stored until it is exhibited or sold. He has no assistant, preferring to catalog the work himself on his Palm Pilot and Apple laptop, constant items in his luggage. He has a fully equipped studio near each of his homes, including on Paris' Left Bank and New York City's Park Avenue, and in villas in Colombia and Pietrasanta, Italy. The late Prince Rainier of Monaco gave Botero a studio in Monte Carlo, where he spends several weeks a year. And Villa del Sol, a plush beachfront resort in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, built a suite to Botero's specifications, and hosts the artist there one month each winter.
This perpetual motion notches up considerable air miles. But the greatest distance Botero has traveled is from his dirt-poor beginnings. His father battled to keep his family afloat in Medellín — now Colombia's second-largest city (and a center of the country's cocaine business), but an isolated backwater during the 1930s and 1940s — by riding mules over rutted mountain tracks and peddling household items to villagers. He died when Botero was just 4, leaving his widow and three sons in such dire poverty that "it was very hard for my mother to feed us," Botero says.
At 15, young Botero began selling paintings of local matadors in a store near Medellín's bullring while he was studying to be a bullfighter himself; he was astonished when one sold for $2. Since few people in town had actually seen original works of art, Botero says he painted "by intuition," but quickly realized he had found his passion. He gently told his mother, Flora, that he wanted to be an artist. "She warned me, 'You're going to die of hunger,'" Botero recalls. "I couldn't care less. I was so happy."
Botero proved his mother wrong the following year, when he was 17, by winning a national art prize of about $7,000, a fortune compared with the pennies his father had earned. He used the money to buy a ticket on an Italian steamer to Europe, where for about three years he painted in flophouses in Florence, Madrid and Paris. Desperate to learn about art, Botero and a friend traveled by motorcycle to the south of France, where they hoped to pick up some tips from the master himself, Picasso. The two knocked on Picasso's door, asking to meet the artist. "They told us to get lost," Botero laughs.
Botero's plump, comical characters appear even when the subject matter is grim. Central to the exhibition in Rome are some of the darkest images Botero has ever created: 45 paintings and drawings depicting the Abu Ghraib prison abuses in Iraq. The canvases — including Abu Ghraib 43, which shows a bruised, hooded detainee tied to the bars of his cell — will be shown publicly for the first time in Rome, and depict agonized, bloodied prisoners being tortured and bound by U.S. military guards. Botero says he was driven by shock at the prisoners' accounts, which haunted him for months. Yet some question even that. "It seems a willed attempt by a comedian to do tragedy," says Robert Storr, former senior curator of paintings at moma and now a professor at New York University.
In fact, Botero knows tragedy firsthand, provided by both his country and his family life. Colombians call their most famous artist El Maestro, and he returns their affection. He's donated hundreds of his paintings and sculptures to museums in Bogotá and Medellín, as well as his entire personal collection of modern art, including works by Chagall, Matisse, Picasso and others he has purchased over the years. "As soon as [the donations] were made official, my father would walk through the streets and people would throw themselves at him," says his son, Juan Carlos Botero Zea, 44, a novelist who moved to Miami five years ago.
But the artist's fame also makes him and his family prime targets for kidnapping. Botero slips into Colombia for brief visits about three times a year, traveling in an armored car with bodyguards provided by the government. In 1993, gangsters came to Botero's house in Colombia looking for him; he was not at home at the time. "When you come from a family with a prominent man like my father, you don't survive a kidnapping," says Juan Carlos.
Increasingly distressed about Colombia's drug wars, Botero has created more than 50 works on the violence, including a painting of druglord Pablo Escobar's 1993 death in a hail of bullets on a Medellín rooftop. Botero regards
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In 1995, Colombia's murky mixture of politics and gangsterism claimed a new victim: Botero's relationship with his eldest son, Fernando Botero Zea, a Harvard-educated politician who was Colombia's Defense Minister and a possible presidential contender. He was arrested on charges of accepting campaign funds for President Ernesto Samper from druglords and later convicted, spending nearly three years in jail. Devastated, Botero visited his son in jail only once, and then refused to talk to him for "three or four years," says the artist.Botero's darkest hour came years earlier, in 1974, with the death of his son, Pedro, whom he calls Pedrito. The Antioquia Museum in Medellín contains a room dedicated to Pedro, who was killed at the age of 4 when a truck rammed into Botero's car in Spain during a family vacation. Juan Carlos recalls his father shut in his Paris studio for weeks after the accident, inconsolable. Even now, 31 years on, Botero can hardly bear to discuss his loss. Botero says the tragedy destroyed his relationship with Pedro's mother — he is now married to the Greek sculptor Sophia Vari — and drove him into a depression, alleviated only by his incessant painting, including several portraits of Pedro. "Several times in my life I have reconstructed my life through painting," Botero says. "That is why painting is so sacred to me. It saves me in my worst moments."
And that is why he describes the life he now lives as the happiest possible, working at a pace some would consider relentless. For him it's a joyful release. "I have so much pressure to work," says Botero. "I haven't found anything that amuses me more. And at my age, you have to enjoy life.
- VIVIENNE WALT | Paris
- Painter Fernando Botero's plump subjects bring him fame, wealth and criticism