From Andes to art stardom
Print Edition
FERNANDO Botero, 84, one of the world’s most renowned living artists, is in China with his first-ever solo exhibition in the country.
After a show in Beijing, the exhibition has moved to Shanghai’s China Art Museum with some 84 canvases, 44 sketches and nine large sculptures.
Shanghai Daily managed to get an interview with Botero in the Peninsula Hotel on the Bund.
Clad in a navy sweater and wearing eyeglasses, the white-haired Botero appeared much younger than his age would suggest, with sharp facial features that linger from a man no doubt very dashing in his youth. The Colombian native, speaking in English, revealed a finely honed sense of humor.
Born in a village in the Andes, Botero grew up amid the deprivations of poverty. His father was a salesman who traveled by mule and died when he was 4 years old; his mother was a seamstress.
His isolated world in the mountains magnified the small life that surrounded him. Locals regarded their mayor as president and their bishop as pope, he said.
As a boy, he had dreams of becoming a bullfighter, but once he discovered watercolors, his life’s ambition changed.
“You will starve to death,” his mother said when he told her he wanted to become an artist.
Botero now lives in Monaco, where the royal family provided him a private studio — one of five he has around the world.
Though far from his roots, his childhood experiences continue to shape his artwork.
When he paints a woman, she is an exuberant woman from Colombia. When he paints people walking, they walk through the lively streets of his native Medellin. When he depicts people dancing and playing musical instruments, they are in the bars of Colombia. His world is at once accessible and enigmatic, filled with atmosphere and populated with enormously imaginative Latino figures.
“You can find in my painting a world I knew in my youth,” he said. “It is a sort of nostalgia, or obsession, which I have turned into the central theme of my work. I lived for 15 years in New York and for a long time in Europe, but those experiences didn’t change my Latin American approach, nature and spirit. The communion with my country is total.”
Literature Nobel Prize laureate Mario Vargas Llosa once described Botero’s world as “sumptuous, unusual, cheerful, tender, innocent, sensual, in which knowledge and reason, spurred on by nostalgia, are continually delving into memory to rectify life by appearing to reproduce it.”
Essentially self-taught, Botero in 1951 won second prize at the Annual Salon of Colombian Artists, allowing him to move to Madrid. There, he studied at the San Fernando Fine Arts Academy and was a regular visitor to the Prado Museum. He then moved to Paris and Florence to expand his understanding of fine art.
The works of Renaissance masters in Florence opened his eyes and changed his life.
He became fascinated with volume and adopted a position intuitively creating monumental, round forms in his works.
He paints his world in a style that has come to be called Boterism. It is instantly recognizable by the exaltation of volume, the exaggeration of form, the remarkable use of colors and the rigor of monumental compositions.
By introducing volume and giving it a new dimension, Botero created a revolution of sorts in 20th century art. Today, Botero is celebrated for both his canvases and sculptures.
The master’s sculptures have been exhibited all over the world, from Champs Elysees in Paris and Park Avenue in New York to the Paseo de la Castellana in Madrid and along the Grand Canal in Venice.
The Botero exhibition will be at China Art Museum through April 3. Admission is free.
The organizer is still working on the possibility of showcasing some of Botero’s sculptures along the Bund.
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