Painting life to the full - Main cover: Fernando Botero - Cover Story

Latino Leaders: The National Magazine of the Successful American Latino, Feb-March, 2003 by Michelle Collins

Fernando Botero artist

"The great public recognizes the fat women, fat food, fat houses, fat mountains, fat generals, fat bishops, fat babies that delight us in the paintings and sculptures of Fernando Botero." So spoke noted Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa upon presenting the Americas Award 2002, this past November, to the famed Colombian artist and champion of the pleasingly plump. After the award ceremony, LATINO LEADERS Publisher Jorge Ferraez conducted an exclusive interview with the artist in his New York apartment.

Readers familiar with the life of Fernando Botero may express surprise at our selection of him as the cover story for this issue. Botero maintains an apartment in New York, which he occupies two months out of every year, dividing most of the rest of his time between Paris and Tuscany, with the occasional stint in his strife-and crime-ravaged homeland. LATINO LEADERS normally dedicates itself to prominent Americans of Hispanic heritage, but to call Botero an American--in the sense that we of the United States normally use the term--would be misleading. Botero is the most Colombian of artists. And if he is not Colombian, he is Latin American. And if he is not Latin American, he is nothing. In his own words at the Americas Foundation award ceremony: "For many years, I have believed that great art is born as a tree, with deep roots buried deep in the soil. It has sprung from a specific place. Although it is paradoxical, there is a necessity to be parochial to be universal. And every important aesthetic creation has developed with the texture of the land where it has originated."

Far from a reference to international economics, Botero the expatriate is making an important statement about his craft. Later, during his interview with us at his New York apartment, he amplified: "I try to represent a Latin American world, because I believe that art has to have roots in a place to achieve universality. What I try to paint is Latin America, Colombia, Medellin, with a little bit of nostalgia. That, at bottom, is the theme of my work. Globalization doesn't work."

Why, then, did LATINO LEADERS choose to highlight this most parochial of universal artists? Because LATINO LEADERS does believe in globalization, a globalization that is in the same spirit of the Americas Foundation, an organization that recognizes the special bond we of the Western Hemisphere share. Especially now, with the United States flexing its powerful economic and political and cultural muscle in every part of the world, we have a special responsibility to become more aware of and in touch with the people mad cultures of other nations, especially those who like us call the United States home. And so we celebrate Fernando Botero.

Who is Fernando Botero?

Born in the provincial city of Medelln in 1932, Botero lost his father, a traveling salesman, at the age of four. The family was left in economically straitened circumstances, but, fortunately for the young Botero, a concerned uncle took him under his wing. A bull-fighting fan, he sent the boy at the age of 12 to a school for trainee matadors. There, inspired by the fiesta brava, the boy began to draw pictures of bulls and bullfighters. Shortly after, he took his first courses in watercolor and in drawing. It must have felt like being given wings: "From drawings of bulls, I soon went to landscapes and still life. Little by little, I was drawn in without realizing it. And when I did, there I was with an enormous vocation."

Within four year's, at the age of 16, Botero had shown his work fox the first time, at an exhibition of artists from his province. Around the same time, he began working as an illustrator for the Sunday supplement of El Colombiano, Medellin's major newspaper. Still in school, he was formally rebuked by the school's headmaster for his nude illustrations in the paper. Then, in an art history, book, the young artist happened upon his next important discovery: the work of Picasso. An article he published at the age of 17, entitled Picasso and Nonconformity in Art, got him expelled from school. Although he was able to finish his high school education elsewhere, Botero knew the needed to leave the stultifying atmosphere of his provincial hometown.

In 1952, two months after graduation, Botero moved to Bogota where, within five months, he held his first solo exhibition. A later exhibition won him second prize for his painting, "On the Coast." The 7,000-peso prize money, plus his savings, earned him a third-class ticket to Europe and away from what he describes as a "desolate" scenario for the arts in Iris native land.

"The native born painters were university professors, but nobody ever sold anything. It was like studying for the priesthood. It was a vocation, and you had to choose it with an awareness of the consequences. I decided to be a painter, but without may expectations."

In Europe Botero studied first in Madrid and then in Florence and, in an age where the modern style of lyrical abstraction was gaining ascendancy in Europe, became particularly influenced by Renaissance painters such as Giotto, Piero della Francesca, and also later painters Rubens and Ingres. In 1955 he returned to Bogota, where he exhibited his works to universal condemnation from the critics, who took their lead from the current Paris fashions in art. He did not sell a single painting.