Fernando Botero, the Colombian whose voluptuous paintings and sculptures of crowded generals, bishops, prostitutes, housewives and other products of his whimsical imagination made him one of the world’s best-known artists, died Friday in Monaco. He was 91.
His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by a close friend, Mauricio Vallejo, co-owner of a Houston art gallery, who said the cause was complications of pneumonia. President Gustavo Petro of Colombia previously announced the death on social media.
As a young artist, Mr. Botero developed an instantly recognizable style and immediately enjoyed great commercial success. Fans sought his autograph and were known to wait for him at airports.
‘It’s the job you do if you want to starve to death,’ people always told me,” he once recalled. “Yet I was so driven to get started that I never thought about the consequences.”
Mr. Botero became permanently associated with the flowery, round figures that filled his photographs. He portrayed middle-class life and brothels, clergy and peasants, overflowing baskets of fruit and the grim consequences of violence.
Fernando Botero Angulo was born on April 19, 1932 in the Colombian city of Medellín. His father died when he was a child. An uncle enrolled him in a Jesuit high school, encouraged his artistic interests and supported him for two years while he studied to become a matador. Scenes of bullfighting appear in some of his earliest works, and he followed bullfighting throughout his life.
After publishing an article titled “Pablo Picasso and Nonconformity in Art,” Mr. Botero was expelled from his Jesuit school for expressing ideas that were said to be “irreligious.” His early influences included Cubism, Mexican murals and the pin-up art of Alberto Vargas, whose “Vargas Girl” drawings he saw in Esquire magazine.
He started publishing illustrations in a local newspaper as a teenager, worked as a set designer, and moved to Bogotá, the capital, in 1951. After his first one-man show there he moved to Paris and spent several years there, as well as in Florence, Italy.
In 1961, New York curator Dorothy Miller purchased a Botero work, “Mona Lisa, Age Twelve,” for the Museum of Modern Art. It was a surprising choice, since Abstract Expressionism was in vogue at the time and Mr. Botero’s sketchy portrait of a chubby-cheeked child seemed out of place.
The Modern’s attention to his work helped Mr. Botero on his path to fame. In 1979 he was the subject of a retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington. Many of his photographs were of corpulent figures that balanced between caricature and pathos.
“A perfect woman in art can turn out to be banal in reality, like a photo in Playboy,” Mr. Botero reasoned. “The most beautiful women in art, like Mona Lisa herself, were ugly in real life. There are people who see the monstrous in my work, but my work is what it is.”
One review of the Hirshhorn show was headlined, “Botero, a hundred thousand dollars for a painting of his in Washington.” That reflected the view of some critics that Mr. Botero’s work was banal, self-referential and out of touch with the vibrant trends in contemporary art.
“The critics have always written about me with anger and rage all my life,” Mr. Botero grumbled.
Writing in The London Evening Standard in 2009, arts writer Godfrey Barker marveled: ‘Wow, how they hate him.’
“The high priests of contemporary art in London and New York cannot stand him because he defies everything they believe in,” Mr. Barker wrote. “They hate him even more because he is rich, has enormous commercial success, is easy on the eyes and very popular with the common people.”
Mr. Botero and his first wife, Gloria Zea, who became Colombia’s culture minister, divorced in 1960 after having three children: Fernando, Lina and Juan Carlos. He spent much of the next fifteen years in New York. Ms. Zea died in 2019. He was married twice more: to Cecilia Zambrano and, in 1978, to Sophia Vari, a Greek painter and sculptor. Mrs. Vari died in May.
He is survived by his three children from his first marriage, as well as a brother, Rodrigo, and grandchildren.
Two setbacks marked Mr. Botero’s family life. In the 1970s, his five-year-old son, Pedro, from his second marriage, was killed in a car accident that injured Mr. Botero. His son Fernando Botero Zea, who had become a politician in Colombia and rose to become defense minister, served 30 months in prison after being convicted in a corruption scandal.
It was in the 1970s that Mr. Botero’s interest in form led him to sculpture. His sculptures, many of which depict flowery, whimsical large people, brought him a new level of public visibility. Major cities clamored to place them along major streets, including, in New York, in the medians of Park Avenue in 1993. Several are on permanent display in nontraditional spaces ranging from the lobby of the Deutsche Bank Center (formerly the Time Warner Center ) in New York to a lounge at the Grand Wailea resort in Hawaii, the Botero Bar.
Mr. Botero was an avid art collector and in 2000 he donated part of his collection to a museum in his hometown of Medellín. Some of his works are interpretations of masterpieces by artists such as Caravaggio, Titian and van Gogh.
Mr. Botero usually depicted his powerful men with at least a hint of irony or satire. But while they may seem silly or self-righteous, and almost all of them are of exaggerated proportions, he imbued them with a degree of dignity.
Jesus was the subject of Mr. Botero in several suggestive works. He painted portraits of Delacroix, Ingres and Giacometti. His images of authority, such as ‘Cardinal’, ‘The English Ambassador’, ‘The First Lady’ and two called ‘The President’, painted in 1987 and 1989, are gently sympathetic. He brought dignity to a man who smoked and a woman who petted a cat.
Many of his subjects, however, were turgid carpets of flesh, bursting from the confines of uniforms, dresses, and towels, unable to cover an exaggerated surface area. He insisted that he never painted fat people because he simply wanted to glorify the sensuality of life.
“I have studied the art of Giotto and all the other Italian masters,” he once said. “I was fascinated by their sense of volume and monumentality. Of course, in modern art everything is exaggerated, so my voluminous figures are also exaggerated.”
Mr Botero and Ms Vari had homes in Paris and Pietrasanta, Italy, where an exhibition was held in 2012 to mark his 80th birthday.
Some who found Mr. Botero’s art essentially playful and lighthearted were surprised when, in 2005, he created a series of graphic paintings based on photographs of prisoners brutalized in the U.S. prison at Abu Ghraib, Iraq.
“These works are the result of the outrage that the violations in Iraq provoked in me and the rest of the world,” he said.
New York Times art critic Roberta Smith wrote that Abu Ghraib’s paintings “restore the dignity and humanity of the prisoners without diminishing their pain or the injustice of their situation.” The novelist and critic Erica Jong called them “astonishing” and claimed that they argued for “a complete revision of what we previously thought of Botero’s work.”
“When we think of the Colombian artist Fernando Botero, most of us visualize his roly-poly people flaunting their fat, their fashionable headgear, their cigarettes and cigarette holders, their excess,” Ms. Jong wrote. “I never saw these as political images until I saw Botero’s Abu Ghraib series.” Now, she added, “I see all of Botero’s work as a record of the brutality of the haves against the have-nots.”
Mr Botero had previously dealt with political issues, particularly the Colombian drug trade, but always returned to more sedate projects. Following the Abu Ghraib series, he made a series of circus photos and then rediscovered his old love for still lifes.
“After all this time,” he said in 2010, “I always come back to the simplest things.”
Ashley Shannon Wu reporting contributed.
