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

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.

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.

But if the torturers are largely absent in these works, the prison dogs are not. They appear in a number of paintings, and one work is a portrait head of a snarling dog. However, these dogs resemble more the hounds of hell than the standard-issue German shepherds familiar from the photographs from Abu Ghraib. As boxy and muscular as the human figures, they stare at their victims with remorseless eyes, bare razor-sharp teeth, and swipe at them with pincerlike paws. In some works, several dogs set upon bound prisoners, gnawing and clawing at different parts of their anatomy. In other works the confrontation is one-on-one, most horrifically in a painting where a dog mauls the back of a bound and prone prisoner, staining his white T-shirt with a spreading pool of blood.

The universality of the themes here, among them the gratuitous cruelty of the captors and the capacity of pain to strip away all vestiges of human dignity, is rendered contemporary by details all too familiar from news accounts. These include the bras and panties prisoners were made to wear, the broomsticks forced into bloody anuses, and the combat boots and latex gloves worn by the guards.

While the echoes of traditional religious art are unmistakable, so are other art-historical references. The spirit of Goya's Disasters of War, created to chronicle the atrocities committed during the 1815-18 Spanish uprising against the French, hovers over these works. One is also reminded of Leon Golub's paintings from the 1980s of mercenaries and police interrogations, which were based on news reports and documentary photographs of the brutality of right-wing death squads in Latin America. Like Botero, Golub turned to art-historical sources to express the evil of the will to power. His paintings draw on the shallow, theatrical space of Classical friezes and Roman wall paintings. However, while Golub focused on the twisted psychology of the torturers, Botero is more interested in how human bodies are marked and distorted by physical abuse.

In this, Botero's new images also bring to mind the paintings of Francis Bacon, who, in works based on the Crucifixion, presented the transformation of flesh into raw and bleeding meat. In particular, the center panel in Botero's triptych Abu Ghraib 44, which portrays the same prisoner in three different positions, depicts a Baconesque pose in which the man is suspended upside down by his leg, while the rest of his bleeding, hooded body sprawls helplessly on the floor.

These works have also occasioned comparisons to Picasso's Gueraica. From a stylistic point of view, of course, Botero's representations seem to have more in common with Picasso's neo-classical period than with Gueraica's fractured Cubism. From a larger perspective, however, there seems some justice to the comparison. Botero is quoted in several of the many articles surrounding the exhibition of this work in Europe as saying that he hopes that his art will do for Abu Ghraib what Picasso did for Guernica. In an acerbic article in Slate (posted May 9, 2005), Christopher

Hitchens takes issue with Botero's ambition, detailing all the historical differences between the Iraq war and the German destruction of the Basque city. But this seems beside the point. Like Guernica, Botero's Abu Ghraib paintings are a cry of pain at the pointless suffering inflicted on the victims of war. As the details of this sorry episode recede into history, specifics will be trumped by a larger sense of horror and outrage, and we will be left, once again, with a visual reminder of humanity's capacity for inhumanity.

"Fernando Botero: Abu Ghraib" was on view at Marlborough Gallery, New York [Oct. 18-Nov. 21, 2006]. Next summer, the Abu Ghraib works are scheduled to be shown at the Palazzo Reale in Milan. Prestel has published a book on the series, Botero: Abu Ghraib, with an essay by David Ebony. A retrospective, "The Baroque World of Fernando Botero," begins its US. tour at the San Antonio Museum of Art [May 26-Aug. 19, 2007] and travels to the Oklahoma City Museum of Art [September-December], the Society of the Four Arts, Palm Beach, Ha. [January-February 2008], the Delaware Art Museum ]March-June 2008], the New Orleans Museum of Art [June-September 2008], the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art [October 2008-January 2009] and the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento [September-December 2009].

Eleanor Heartney is a freelance critic based in New York.

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