Colombian Art: Fernando Botero, and Why He Sucks

Look! It’s the Mona Lisa, and she’s FAT! Get it?

Fernando Botero is a human artistic cop-out. He has one idea – everything is fat – and he has spent his entire life painting and sculpting the same thing, over and over again. He calls himself the most Colombian of Colombian artists, but there is precious little of Colombia in the vast majority of his works; there is just chubbiness and rounded edges, ad infinitum. Okay, so he painted Pablo Escobar getting shot, and he paints people dancing or tiled roofs from time to time, but these are incidental to his work. His main mission is to give people who would otherwise be bored looking at art a case of the giggles with his fat people, and moreso when he paints a naked fat woman. Look at her big ass! Har har!

A Berkeley University Magazine description of the artist’s work sums it up:

The millionaire artist walks to a corner of his Paris studio, bends over, and picks up an illustration of what has become his instantly recognizable franchise. It is a still-life painting of oversize fruit, the canvas ablaze in color and curves. 

This is everything wrong with the art world and Botero in two sentences. He has become a millionaire with an “instantly recognizable franchise.” What is he, McDonalds? Yes, actually. He will be pumping out more of his assembly line fat people for whoever wants to buy it until he can’t paint them anymore. His style is an obese golden goose egg. Even the fruit he paints are fat. Why? Does he have any particular reason for painting this way?

Maybe the artist himself can explain his vision in a way that even peons like me can understand:

"An artist loves a certain kind of form. The artist doesn’t know why he or she is attracted to the form. He just paints based on his intuitive ideas. After his work is done, he may adjust his paintings in the way it can be rationally understood. If not, the artist justifies what he has painted." 

Thanks for clearing that up! So he can’t explain in a straightforward manner what his fat people and things mean or why he paints them. So mysterious! It comes from deep in his subconscious. The paintings just flow through him! I don’t expect an artist to explain every little detail, but pretending like these works come from some mystical and unexplainable artistic wellspring is the same as not having an explanation, or perhaps a cover-up of how embarrassing the real reason is: because they attract attention and money with very little effort.

Then there was the new millennium, when this most Colombian of Colombian artists decided to do a series of paintings about that most Colombian of subjects – American soldiers torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Are you unsettled yet? The original photos and the acts they show, sure that’s shocking. But it is a reflection of Botero’s laziness that he can’t come up with anything more interesting than painting current events. He is riding the coattails of outrage and anger, piling onto a mountain that is already towering with twisted emotions and violence. Botero adds what, precisely, to the reams of commentary and recriminations that Abu Ghraib created? He is a gawking free rider, hating what is easy for the art world and faux bohemians to hate the world over. All that’s missing is the painting of Bush and Rumsfeld with devil horns, or am I giving him ideas?

Botero says that the world of art critics doesn’t like him because he’s not avant-garde enough, and that’s probably true to some extent. Art critics are snooty bunch, and seem to usually prize anything that is abstract or focuses on debased subject matter. The fat and satisfied figures of a typical Botero painting are not going to animate a critic, but for once the critics might have a point: this stuff is not much better than corporate logo. When an artist has an instantly recognizable shtick, it should make him want to experiment, to test limits. But Botero has been doing the same thing for his whole career.

I am not alone in my dislike of Botero’s work; even a grumbling minority of Colombians are beginning to get fed up with man’s deification. There is a punk band here called “Odio a Botero” (I hate Botero) that mirrors my feelings exactly about the man. In an interview, when asked whether they really didn’t like the artist, the band members said hell yeah:

What does the name Odio a Botero mean? Do the band's members really hate the master Fernando Botero? Of course they do, and they've said it many times in public without compassion. Botero, "the master," seems like a mediocrity to them, only painting fat ladies because it's easy and he's lazy. 

In 2006, the band was supposed to play an open-air rock festival in Medellin, and Paisas got offended that a band with that name was playing in the city of Botero’s birth. (Think of his feelings!) The band was removed from the lineup after some sulking Paisas complained. So there is still an uphill battle in having the opinion that the guy is an artistic hack in Colombia.

Consider this post my small part in rectifying that situation. I plan on covering all sorts of Colombian art and artists in future writings on this site, but it seemed important for me to clear my throat and get this charlatan out of the way first. The man so dominates any discussion of Colombian art that most foreigners can’t even name another Colombian artist. From the moment a tourist cracks open their Lonely Planet guidebook the propaganda begins, and one becomes indoctrinated in the gloriousness of Botero’s art before they have even set foot in the country. It’s high time that this guy retired to painting images on Coke cans and left the rest of us alone with art that is actually beautiful and thought-provoking to contemplate.