953. Fernando Botero (1932-), Colombian,

The President, 1969. Oil on canvas, 267 x 135 cm.

Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen,

Staatsgalerie moderner Kunst, Munich.

 

 

Fernando Botero

(1932 Medellin –)

 

Fernando Botero is one of the few twentieth-century artists who has been able to win critical acclaim and at the same time exercise a broad popular appeal with his paintings and sculptures of enormously inflated, volumetric figures both human and animal. After training as a matador, he worked as a newspaper illustrator. An early and crucial influence was that of the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. The 1950s brought Botero to Europe, where he worked and studied in Barcelona, Madrid, Paris and Florence. During this period he developed a passion for the Old Masters from Giotto, Uccello and Piero della Francesca, with their emphasis on simplified and sculptural form, through to the more painterly Velázquez and Goya. In the 1960s Botero was based in New York. In 1961 he painted his hugely popular Mona Lisa, Age Twelve, subsequently acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. By the mid 1960s Botero’s highly individual and instantly recognisable style with its smoothly-applied paint and inflated and rounded forms was fully developed. In the 1970s Botero moved to Paris, where he began to concentrate on sculpture. Amongst his better-known public sculptures are the Broadgate Venus in London and a giant male cat who menaces the new Ramblas in Barcelona.