His popularity began with the presentation of his Mona Lisa at the MOMA
Why is Botero’s work of utmost importance for the History of Art and for scholars?
Latin Americans?
Fernando Botero makes an artistic work that goes beyond the impositions of the so-called Contemporary Art. Botero is contemporary and is the best representative of the artists who did not need the “validation” of curators and auction houses, nor the great collectors who manipulated the very concept of the discipline to legitimize the artefacts without rhyme or reason that swarm the museums. of today. Although this, to tell the truth, only happened in the first stage of him.
The public reception of his collections began definitively with the presentation of his Mona Lisa at MoMA simultaneously with the Metropolitan exhibiting the original by Renaissance master Lionardo da Vinci.
This was a feat because the fashion and the imposition of the current snobbish world and subsidized by the Congress for Cultural Freedom that established as great works those of his pupils Pollock, Rothco, Motherwell, and de Kooning who even invented a new current: “ abstract expressionism.
With all the studies that Botero carried with him, it was impossible to turn him into one more of those that the public sees and goes out to get into. His time at the San Fernando Academy in Madrid and his meticulous study in Florence of the Renaissance masters provided him with all the energy that he exploded when he came into contact with Mexico. The huge Olmec heads and his admiration for Rubens gave him the compass he needed to never lose his way again. But it must be said that before making fat of him, Botero met in the Prado the two fat of Juan Carreño de Miranda and the Russian Boris Kustodiev.
Those of Carreño, like majas, one dressed and the other naked, are painted with much more academic than Botero who in the end “simplifies” his lines to make a caricature.
But when his detractors accuse him of making caricatures, they praise him more than degrade him. Is not caricature the most refined and complicated art? Botero’s grandiosity is volumetry and humor. Can that denigrate an artist?
The work of Hieronymus Bosch, which is indeed Baroque, presents us with an imaginative and magical world full of strange beings who, gathered in the artist’s pictorial space, create a visual comedy to the liking of the viewer of any age. And the same thing happens with botero.
This Colombian painter shows that art has not been defeated by usurping artifacts that offend human beings who consider themselves homo sapiens.
Despite his great admiration for the classics, his teachers, Botero created a Latin American work similar to that of his compatriot García Márquez, with his magical literary realism, which Vargas Llosa could not, obsessed by his airs of grandeur and his blue blood that he has never had.
The atmosphere that is breathed in Botero’s works is the same as that of Macondo, of “love in the time of cholera” and of the colonel who took care of his rooster and waited, for more than twenty years, for a pension that never came.
For Botero, art is art and it is done in the company of solitude and silence. In the different workshops there are no “you come” or sexual slaves to do the work for you so that you only have to sign it.
Even washing the brushes gives Botero pleasure knowing that this is part of the beautiful craft of the atelier that Balthus is solved by his Japanese.
The fame of this painter was not given to him, he earned it.
Now, once Botero established himself, he could not avoid being absorbed by that market that is only interested in money and that gives him three dicks about the work itself. This is how those great millionaire collectors, seeing the popularity of Botero, began to buy everything at a high price and then they themselves took it to auctions, which is where the deception occurs and transforms their collections into super-millionaires. Once the auction houses place it in their ranking in perfect harmony with the owners, the tour of all the museums that “cannot afford not to have a Botero in their collection” begins. Since Botero is alive, he becomes a competition for his own merchandise and he already knows what the market price is.
He has the luxury of making “donations” such as the collection to Medellín for the Botero Museum in his country or the series of 78 works he did denouncing the torture of US soldiers in the Abu Ghraib prison. This collection was donated to the University of Berkeley in San Francisco, California, perhaps to spoil the Americans or perhaps as a marketing coup to further increase his popularity and the price of his work and that of his collectors. .
There is such a mediocre Spanish painter that it is not even worth mentioning. He lives off the “scandals” that he himself makes on YouTube because he doesn’t know “no shit” about art, and even less about Botero’s work. He, like collectors, is not interested in art, he cares that they LIKE his stupid window that disorients and distorts.
Botero’s magnificent caricatures have been made due to the tenacity and humor that he managed to put on them, as a hallmark, although he is seen as a serious man who only enjoys creating them. It is in this way that he establishes, without intending to, his own current of boterismo as there was already Modiglianism, Vangohism, Chagallismo, Giacomettismo… so strong and imposing that they create sequels as they become classics.
Rogelio Barillas’ Mona Lisa is much more beautiful than Botero’s, but who is Barillas? A perfect stranger that I discovered on the internet. This Mona Lisa is not going to be worth the millions of Botero’s because it is simply an “improved” copy. But it is not necessary to be surprised if the commercial world catches him with collecting Barillas and putting him on the same level as the imitated one. What can’t they do with all the millions they manage to manipulate world opinion?
The artistic quality of the caricatures of the German Sebastian Krüger demonstrates a far superior mastery of drawing that Botero displays. Its completion is of a bill not seen since the Renaissance. But Kruger is going to be a problem for millionaire collectors when they ask him for 500 pieces to sell to each museum because his creations take time like all good art.
Artistic talent is not enough for the commercial world, what is important is the value that it has fictitiously acquired from what they are specialists.
Of the most talented followers and therefore creators, in the end, of their own fat women with their own characteristics, we must mention Teté Marella, Malgré Elle. When in 1975 she held a beautiful exhibition of cartoons in the Colonial City, no politician, no singer, no journalist who inspired her deigned to support her. Nobody gave her a penny for those magnificent works of hers and this disappointed her enormously, a disappointment that coincided with the rise of Botero whom she followed. She found a way to make caricatures without making caricatures, like Botero. Both Lucien Freud, Jenny Saville, Teté Marella, Melchor Terrero, Rogelio Barillas and many others assumed boterismo as something normal. Lack of originality? Freedom of the artist? derivative art? What does attract attention is the price of one and the other.
Therefore, it is not the School of Fine Arts, nor its teaching that must be eliminated, it is rather that mafioso mechanism of auction houses and “collectors” that would have to disappear, which is almost impossible because they represent the essence of the system that created them and that is standing.
