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In a painting by the late Colombian artist Fernando Botero, a woman dressed in green looks directly at the viewer. In the background stretches a natural landscape, while a transparent veil covers her dark, curly hair.
Together with his barely visible eyebrows, these elements make the portrait clearly refer to Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. However, the work brings together all the features that make it unmistakably Botero's: the figure has a rounded body, a large head and small features.
Mona Lisa (1978) is one of many works in which the painter and sculptor reinterprets some of the world's most famous paintings and motifs through his signature style, known as "boterism."
Botero's figures and voluminous objects have made him one of the most recognizable artists in Latin America. "Some artists have a very personal language, and Botero is one of them: you will always recognize one of his works," says Belén Herrera Ottino, director of Opera Gallery Madrid.
The gallery's London headquarters is currently presenting the exhibition Fernando Botero: In Praise of an Amplified World, which can be visited until the end of November.
Botero's unique style has earned him international recognition. His painting "The Mona Lisa at Twelve Years" (1959) was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1961; His bronze sculptures have been exhibited in highly relevant public spaces, such as Park Avenue in New York and the Champs-Elysées in Paris; and his painting "The Musicians" (1979) reached an auction price of $5.1 million at Christie's New York in November 2023, two months after his death.
But what meaning lies behind Botero's characteristic style and what can it reveal to us about the history of art in Europe and Latin America?
For Botero, exaggerating objects and figures was "a way of celebrating the presence of things," says Herrera Ottino, who adds that it was also a "celebration of life and the sensuality of nature."
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Throughout his life, he often explained that the main objective of his works was to lift the spirits of those who viewed them, something that, in his opinion, form and color, in particular, could achieve.
"For him it was clear that, throughout history, the purpose of art was to create pleasure," adds the artist's son and former Colombian Defense Minister, Fernando Botero Zea.
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The power of boating
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The origins of Boterism date back to 1956, when Botero lived in Mexico City. When painting Still Life with Mandolin (1957), he accidentally drew a resonance opening that was too small on the instrument and "felt that the mandolin acquired an excessive volume and shape," Botero Zea tells the BBC.
"That was the day Botero's style was born." From then on, the artist created all his works as part of the same singular universe, in which everything occupies space. "There are very few artists who have created an entire universe defined by a single style."
Numerous paintings, drawings and sculptures by Botero can also be seen at the Botero Museum in Bogotá, Colombia, along with pieces from his personal collection (including works by Picasso, Monet and Dalí).
When the artist donated these works to the Central Bank of Colombia (which manages the museum) in 2000, "he was relating his own work to European tradition," explains Nicolás Gómez Echeverri, the bank's arts director, to the BBC. "It's telling visitors, 'My name is on the same level as these others.'"
Image source, Juan Barreto/AFP via Getty Images
What the Botero Museum collection also shows is that Botero was obsessed with the great European masters. "My father was fascinated by great artists," says Botero Zea.
"He firmly believed that the high point of art history was the [Italian] Renaissance and that after that period there was a decline, with brilliant exceptions such as Picasso and the Impressionist painters."
The artist was especially repelled by abstraction, and noted that the popularity of his own work was due to the fact that it was so far removed from an approach "in which everything is dark" and the viewer "feels like he needs a teacher to tell him if it is good or not," Botero told the Los Angeles Times in 2012.
"I think a painting has to address itself directly to the viewer."
Botero Zea says that his father especially admired Italian art after moving to Madrid in 1952, at the age of 20. At that time, Botero was studying at the prestigious Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando and working as a copyist at the Prado Museum.
Then, Botero saw a book about the 15th-century Italian painter Piero della Francesca in a store window and immediately "made the decision to move to Florence," explains Botero Zea.
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The art that inspired him
According to Botero Zea, two works of art especially marked Botero's professional career. The first is "The Meeting between the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon" (1452-1466), by Piero della Francesca, a large fresco depicting a biblical scene in which King Solomon meets the Queen of Sheba.
This work dates back to Botero's childhood in Medellín (Colombia), where he had little access to art museums and became familiar with art through the religious paintings and sculptures found inside Catholic churches.
Della Francesca's work "The Duke and Duchess of Urbino" (c. 1473-1475), a double portrait inspired by ancient Roman coins and medals, served as inspiration for Botero's diptych "Federico da Montefeltro, Battista Sforza" (1998).
In the original version, the duke looks to the left, hiding the side of his joustingly disfigured face. Although Botero does not reinterpret the duke's face with these scars, he inverts the sides towards which the two characters look. Additionally, both appear noticeably plumper, taking up more of the canvas.
Botero's focus on form causes many people to interpret his work simply as a representation of "fat" people. In Menina, according to Velázquez, the artist focuses on the central figure of Diego Velázquez's masterpiece, Las meninas (1656): the five-year-old Infanta Margarita Teresa of Austria.
In Botero's version, his face is plumper and his figure is more voluminous. In Fornarina, according to Rafael (2009), he does something similar by transforming Rafael's La Fornarina (Portrait of a Young Woman) (1518-1519), which represents an almost naked woman, barely covered by a thin veil over the lower abdomen, into a corpulent, smiling figure.
However, Botero himself explicitly rejected the term "fat." In 2014, she told the Spanish newspaper El Mundo: "I don't paint fat people... Nobody believes me, but it's true." He said that if he painted a woman, a man, a dog or a horse, he always did so thinking about volume.
Another influence was "The Battle of San Romano," a series of three paintings by Florentine artist Paolo Uccello illustrating a confrontation between Florentine and Sienese forces in 1432. Botero Zea highlights a plump white horse with a deep blue harness in the center of one of the works. The animal stands out among a sea of men in dark armor, which, according to Botero Zea, looks like "a Botero."
Similar horses can be found throughout Botero's work, including in "El Arrastre" (1984), a scene in which three horses carry the body of a dead bull out of a traditional bullring.
But the fact that a Colombian artist is so captivated by European artists raises questions about visibility and what art is considered significant.
Botero Zea remembers that, when he was a child, his father took him to some of the most important museums in the world, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Louvre in Paris, the National Gallery in London and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. According to him, Botero used to be attracted to the masterpieces of the most famous artists in history.
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However, Gómez Echeverri affirms that Botero's work is not limited to praising Western art; in fact, his art explores Colombia's relationship with him. He explains that the Mona Lisa, for example, can be found in print all over the country.
"There's a restaurant nearby called Mona Lisa, and it's a pizzeria," he says. A bar located in a popular area of the city also has representations of Dalí on its walls. "I think that these types of works by Botero, like his Mona Lisa, reaffirm how these images come from another context on the other side of the ocean and become part of our Latin American visual culture."
Knowing that Botero was influenced by pre-Columbian art, which often featured large, rounded forms, also recontextualizes his work.
"He always felt very Colombian and always strove to represent this country well on the international stage," says Botero Zea.
For Gómez Echeverri, Botero was breaking the barrier between "high" and "low" art.
"What it says is that this barrier does not exist: both can be part of the same references," he says, adding that, although some may understand "'high' art as European, classicist and white," Botero is turning that idea on its head.
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