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An iconography of torture: exhibited recently in New York, Fernando Botero's Abu Ghraib series of paintings and drawings graphically depicts Iraqi prisoners undergoing abuse at the hands of their U.S. captors
Art in America, Jan, 2007 by Eleanor Heartney
Colombian artist Fernando Botero is best known for his highly mannered, widely popular paintings and sculptures of corpulent figures: nudes, personages from famous paintings of the past, and men and women from all walks of Latin American society. In a new series of works based on published reports of the degradations visited on Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison, he departs from his familiar, crowd-pleasing subject matter to create a powerful group of paintings and drawings that bear comparison with much of the great political art of the modern era. In these paintings, the pneumatic bodies, precise brushwork and smooth surfaces that have sometimes seemed bland and ingratiating are put into the service of a horrific theme that gains force from its contrast with the artist's essentially conservative style. The softly rounded flesh of the prisoners' naked bodies becomes a canvas upon which prison guards and prison dogs inscribe bright red scars, bruises and cuts, while the starkly geometric prison cells in which they are held become stages upon which unspeakable acts are performed. Some of the many drawings are done in gray charcoal with accents of red, which bring out bruises and blood. Others are drawn entirely in sanguine conte crayon, heightening their emotional urgency.
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As Botero has explained, these paintings and drawings are mostly based on published descriptions of the conditions at Abu Ghraib rather than on the notorious photographs that surfaced in 2004 and led to the conviction of some low-level U.S. soldiers. In particular, he cites a May 2004 New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh. Botero has taken few liberties with the reports, aside from endowing the thin and often underfed prisoners with his trademark bulbous bodies. Otherwise staying faithful to factual accounts, the works depict prisoners threatened or clawed by dogs, pried naked in jumbled heaps, beaten or urinated on by guards, sprawled in prison cells with arms tied to bars or walls or lying on the floor, bloodied and curled in pain, with bound arms and legs. In other works, we see them being forced into sexual acts with each other at the hands of burly guards.
Botero completed the works over a 14-month period in 2004 and 2005. They were subsequently seen as part of a traveling retrospective that made stops at the Palazzo Venezia in Rome, the Wurth Museum in Kunzelsau, Germany, and the Pinacoteca in Athens. This retrospective, titled "The Baroque World of Fernando Botero," is coming to the U.S. in the spring, but the Abu Ghraib works were separated out and presented as a series at Marlborough Gallery in New York. The reasons for this are somewhat cloudy. Botero says that the works were too incendiary for American museums, while the participating institutions say they were not offered this part of the show. One thing is clear: at the artist's insistence, the Abu Ghraib works are not for sale.
This body of work is not Botero's first foray into politics. An equally provocative series from the late 1990s recounts in graphic detail the destruction his native country has suffered during the ongoing wars of the drug cartels. These works pay homage to the indigenous folk art that inspired the angry tableaux of the Mexican muralists, while also echoing the tradition of political caricature embodied in the works of figures such as William Hogarth, James Gillray, Honore Daamier and Jose Guadalupe Posada.
Here a different set of references is in evidence. The Iraq war has been haunted by the specter of the Crusades, defined as the archetypal clash of Islamic and Christian cultures. The rhetoric that surrounds the war often involves comparisons with medieval religious wars and ancient tribal conflicts. In this context, there is something strangely appropriate about Botero's deliberate invocation of traditional Christian iconography in his Abu Ghraib paintings and drawings. His bound and hooded figures assume poses that bring to mind medieval and Renaissance paintings of Christ and the trials and torture of the saints. While the borrowings are rarely direct (though David Ebony, in an excellent essay in an accompanying book, proposes a few explicit appropriations of pose and setting), slumping figures with one or both arms tied to prison bars bring to mind Crucifixion images, while twisted torsos, striped with lashes and sprinkled with drops of blood, make one think of representations of the flagellation of Christ and the martyrdom of figures like Saint Sebastian. Meanwhile, the world in which these atrocities take place is characterized by floor-to-ceiling grids of bars whose rigid geometry brings to mind the equally rectilinear settings in which artists like Piero della Francesca or Mantegna staged their representations of Christian martyrdoms.
With a few exceptions, the prison guards are offstage or represented only by a boot or a hand emerging from beyond the canvas edge. Instead, the focus is on the prisoners themselves, as they suffer their torments with grimaces that are often largely obscured by hoods or blindfolds. In the absence of fully visible faces, these naked and near naked bodies become the vehicles of emotional expression.
