"The Dancers,” 2002, an example of the intense colors Botero achieves with pastel, depicts a scene in a ballroom crowded with dully clad men and gaily garbed women. It is a sizeable 56 by 46½ inches.
:Colombian artist Fernando Botero has become known worldwide for domestic and social scenes rendered in gentle colors and populated by extravagantly rounded figures. As Colombian Ambassador to the United States Carolina Barco puts it, Botero is a "universal man, whose surprising parameters of proportion have redefined contemporary art." Both amusing and disturbing, Botero's paintings and sculpture create an accessible but often enigmatic world that encourages viewers to make their own interpretations of his images.
Although he spends most of his time outside his native country, Botero (b 1932) is first and foremost a proud Colombian, his heart and art inspired by good times and bad and the natural beauty of that country. "I have never ceased being a Colombian," says Botero. "My country and 'Paisa' origin have been my strength and spirit, the essence of my artistic creation."
A good summation of the artist's ample talent is reflected in "The Baroque World of Fernando Botero," on view at the Nevada Museum of Art through July 25. Organized and circulated by Art Services International in Alexandria, Va., it comprises 100 paintings, drawings and sculpture.
Born in Medellin, in the Colombian Andes, Botero lost his father at the age of four. As a teenager, he drew illustrations for Medellin publications and participated in area exhibitions. Moving to Bogotá, Colombia's capital, at 19, he was deeply influenced by Mexican mural artists Jose Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Sequiros, and began painting large Orozco-like watercolors.
"The men in Botero's paintings may be good fathers and kind husbands, but they are also macho individuals who are familiar with the girls in the local brothels,” observes catalog essayist John Sillevis. "The House of Marta Pintuco,” 2001, reflects this fact of Latin American life.
With some prize money, he enrolled at the Academia San Fernando in Madrid, where Goya and Velázquez became inspirations. Seven years later, drawing on the art of Velázquez, Botero painted a forlorn, frightened "Girl Lost in a Garden." Subsequently, he created a number of his own versions of the angelic royal princess in Velázquez's celebrated "Las Meninas" in the Prado Museum in Madrid.
Disillusioned by the French avant-garde art he saw during a sojourn in Paris, Botero spent time copying Old Masters at the Louvre. "He knew," writes Dutch art historian John Sillevis in the exhibition catalog, "that he could only learn from great masters…." After several years in Italy, where he studied fresco painting and old masterpieces, he returned to Bogotá in 1955.
In addition to getting married and having children, Botero around this time began to expand the volume of forms in his art, launching the mature period of his career. His epiphany came in Mexico City in 1956, when he discovered that when "he reduced the central opening [of the mandolin he was sketching] he changed the proportions and the volume of the mandolin to something huge," writes Sillevis. "From then on he knew what he was going to do. He would enlarge everything he would draw or paint to a baroque shape, an expression of sumptuousness and sensuality, not only in a human figure, but also in a still life — in fruits or in a mandolin."
At first, art critics, bedazzled by Abstract Expressionism, were puzzled as to how to evaluate Botero's style and subjects and in what niche to locate him. Among those who considered figurative art dead,
