The Colombian painter Fernando Botero celebrated a life full of warmth in a troubled country

The Museo de Antioquia in the Colombian city of Medellín has a painting of the death of Pablo Escobar, painted by Fernando Botero. The drug lord, killed in 1993, is then a giant who, riddled with bullets, lies on a roof in a fairytale city. It has a friendly appearance that fits in with Botero’s work, which always resembles a picture book. But with this charged theme, the naive approach gives food for thought, just like with Botero’s other paintings of Escobar, such as the image where he is armed on a roof and receives a rain of bullets.

That seems heroic, but it is highly questionable whether the painter, who died this week at the age of 91, intended it that way. When a rival drug gang planted a bomb at Escobar’s home earlier in 1993, it was reported in the news that a painting by Botero was also hanging there. The painter then showed to the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo knew that he found it abhorrent that the drug criminal owned his work and then, for safety’s sake, he briefly traveled to Europe.

Bullfighter

Botero was born in 1932, like Escobar in Medellín. And just like his infamous fellow townsman, Botero became a Colombian celebrity. According to him, he trained as a bullfighter until he started drawing and painting seriously at the age of fourteen. At sixteen he became an illustrator for the cultural supplement of the newspaper El Colombiano. He moved to Bogotá, exhibited, won an art prize, and used the prize money to buy a boat trip to Europe.

In Italy he discovered Renaissance artists such as Giotto, Masaccio and Michelangelo. He wanted to mix the sensuality of full forms in Italian art with his own Colombian style. For this he drew on Mexican mural art and pre-Columbian art. He mixed this into his own naive-looking figuration, with the most striking feature being the characters, which he always turned into funny, round-shaped people.

That was a gimmick, but perhaps that cheerfulness was also a response to the unrest in his country. In Colombia, ravaged by the FARC guerrilla movement and drug violence, painter and sculptor Botero celebrated a life full of warmth with his colorful work. He was also optimistic himself. For example, the always stern-looking artist told the Kunsthal in Rotterdam in 2016 that he believed in a future of peace for his country. The Kunsthal showed some of his paintings with warm tones, inspired by the colorful houses of his youth. That feeling of melancholy characterized his painting, which was very accessible and loved by a wide audience. He became the most famous painter in Colombia – his death was announced this Friday by Colombian President Gustavo Petro.

Abu Ghraib

The art world itself often reacted skeptically to his style, which over the years had become flat and uniform, in which the consistently clumsy figures and silly facial expressions had little expressiveness. But Botero didn’t want to change that signature style. It tended towards the caricatured, but was too naive to be truly grim. Although sometimes the topics were. From the 1990s he made paintings about violence in Colombia, and in the 2000s he drew and painted the torture in Abu Ghraib prison. Combined with his ‘Boterismo’, those topics may have had a sting, but he also made them digestible.

Over the years, largely self-taught, he had built up an international curriculum of exhibitions and assignments all over the world. He traveled a lot, married three times, and went to live in Paris. In his drawings and paintings he mourned the death of his third child, who died in a car accident during his second marriage. In 1976 he married the Greek artist Sophia Vari, his third wife.

His love of art history is evident from his art collection of 19th and 20th century artists. Together with his own work, he donated these to the Museo de Antioquia in Medellín and to the Banco de la República in Bogotá, therefore also called Museo Botero.

Also read Botero’s Bogotá: There is even a Botero in the toilet of my hotel room

His love for art history is also evident from the sculptures he made. Large and robust, they radiate the power of old ruler portraits and equestrian statues. They were set up in the streets of Barcelona, ​​Madrid, Jerusalem, New York, Bamberg, Yerevan and of course Medellín. That art also did not escape violence. During an attack in Medellín in 1995 that killed and injured a sculpture of him was blown up. Later he presented the city with an identical statue: a bird, as a symbol of peace and hope.