Artist Fernando Botero dies

Yesterday in Monaco, at the age of 92, one of the most famous artists of our time, Fernando Botero, the creator of the most rounded people and things in painting and sculpture of the twentieth century, died.

“The most Colombian of Colombians” master, Botero acquired his instantly recognizable style back in the late 1950s, his “fat” people and equally “fat” still lifes in painting and sculpture flooded museums and streets of cities around the world. His heroes could be dressed or naked, they could dance or pose, they could bear the name “Mona Lisa” or “Pope Leo X”, be portraits of Delacroix, Ingres and Giacometti, stand like idols or loll on their stomachs with a cigarette in their hands, but always they were uniformly plump, round and overweight in body, face and weight. His still lifes, however, were exactly the same – tables, vessels and fruit tended to the circle as the ideal form of earthly existence.

Botero was criticized for this “monotony” all his life. Spectators and collectors adored him for this reason. As a result, without a doubt, the artist won: 70 years of active artistic activity, worldwide fame and a variety of interpretations ensured his place in the history of art.

Fernando Botero was born in 1931 in Medellin, Colombia. Jesuit school, a couple of years at the school of matadors, the capital Bogota, then studying at the academy in Madrid. It became clear quite early that Botero would be an artist (at the age of 16 he was already working as an illustrator for a newspaper), but what kind of artist he would be became clear after his European voyage. In 1953, Botero went to Paris to study at the most important educational institution in the world – the Louvre, which his distant predecessors, from Courbet to Soutine, preferred to all academies in the world. He spends 1954 in Florence with exactly the same goals. “I studied the art of Giotto and all the other Italian masters,” he would say later. “I was fascinated by their sense of volume and monumentality. Of course, in modern art everything is exaggerated, so my three-dimensional figures also became exaggerated.” The conclusion made by Botero does not seem unambiguous, but the fact remains: the “exaggerated” forms of all things became for the artist the language of his art.

There are practically no downturns, much less failures, in Botero’s biography. Already in 1961, New York curator Dorothy Miller bought his work “Mona Lisa, Twelve Years” for the Museum of Modern Art. It was an unexpected and provocative choice: the early 1960s, the absolute dominance of American abstract expressionism, next to which Botero’s portrait of a chubby-cheeked child seemed, at best, out of place.

However, the painting was exhibited at MoMA exactly in those days when Leonardo’s original “Mona Lisa” was shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Further – more: solo exhibitions in Latin America and the USA (an exhibition in 1979 at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington opened the way for a long tour of Botero retrospectives around the world, including exhibitions in St. Petersburg and Moscow in 1993-1994, after which in His wonderful sculptures remain in the Hermitage and the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts.

Prices for his works are consistently very high: auction estimates for his paintings do not fall below $1 million.

All this is certainly annoying. The nickname “Latin American Picasso”, which was attached to Botero in his youth, is erroneous in many ways. Picasso never allowed himself to be so monotonous and recognizable. The 19th century taught that this is a sign of salon, purely commercial art. Botero’s market success seems to confirm this nomination. Critics of the 1960s–1980s, much more passionate than those of today, poured buckets of mud on the Colombian: they say that his work is banal, self-referential and divorced from the bright trends of contemporary art. In a 2009 essay, the writer and artist Godfrey Barker marveled at the power of this fury: “The high priests of modern art in London and New York hate him because he challenges everything they believe. They hate him even more because he is rich, a huge commercial success, good looking and very popular among the common people.” Botero rather found this funny: “Critics have always written about me with anger and fury, all my life.”

At the same time, the question of whether this is great art has long ceased to exist. Botero’s works are so good and bring so much pleasure to the audience that not a single museum or municipality that owns them will refuse the opportunity to show them.

Meanwhile, upon closer inspection, it turned out that not all of Botero’s works are so serene.

The Botero series was a shock, caused by the discovery of torture in the American prison Abu Ghraib in Iraq. “Fat” executioners torture the same “fat” prisoners. Traces of torture on plump bodies, a grin of voluptuousness on the faces of representatives of power: the “Latin American Picasso” gave his version of “Guernica.”

To live the life of an artist the way Botero lived it is a dream. Create your own world, populate it with your own heroes, liken them to balloons that are always “pleasant to look at” and will always make you smile, be rich and loved. All this completely refutes the unspoken law of the romantic idea of ​​the true artist as unrecognized, poor, with doubts, phobias and abuses. Picasso and Warhol were the first to break this image. Botero took the situation to the breaking point. To die at the age of 91, surrounded by family, having been in fame and fortune for almost seven decades, is some kind of too ideal plot for our so imperfect century. Botero’s death will force critics to reconsider his legacy. “Fat” people and things may certainly not be so simple.