2023-09-16 12:17:44
He never said where the obese gene came from. The desire for the plump body must have turned into a righteous compulsion. There is no other explanation for the durability of the doll’s round body shape, from which the Colombian painter Fernando Botero created an extremely popular life’s work.
Let’s put it this way: For him, vitality includes corpulence. The painter seems to be interested in this convinced since the fifties. It’s like a handwritten signature that you can’t get out of the habit with all your will. However disciplined the line starts from one point, however disciplined it moves to the other, it cannot help but help the genuinely fat one to appear.
And again the skins stretch over the padded limbs, balloon-like skulls bulge from specially made linen, and even the coffee pot on the still life table cannot be denied a bulimic tendency. XXL, full-figured both naked and scantily dressed. And nothing is exempt from the balloonesque phenotype, not the cat under the table and not the tuba in the arm of the tuba player.
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The heavy species were often taken lightly, and the short-legged, fat-necked owners were quickly turned into caricatures. That’s probably where they belong, otherwise the strange compulsion to stuff them wouldn’t be understandable. These child-like adults in their kindergarten world, the button-eyed hobbyhorse riders, tailors in floral dresses, big-headed little hat wearers and towel-stuffing naked actresses, what could the fat mean if not the brazen, who is the brass holder posing for on his giant chair if not the chubby self-satisfaction the bourgeois form of socialization?
Of course it is. Of course, the symbolically pompous thing is also a mockery of pomposity. And it is obvious that weightiness also likes to surround itself with importance, with insignia of dignity, bishop’s crosiers, gala uniforms, cigars and presidential wife’s handbags. And yet Botero’s work would be misunderstood if one wanted to limit it to mild mockery of the peacocky and snazzy.
Im Botero-Museum in Bogota
What: AFP
There are sudden leaps in the good-natured design, dangerous darkenings on the fat-lined baby face. The big fat man stands powerfully in the picture, and the little fat man sits on the street and brushes his shoes, and the shoe and foot and leg above him are like a hydraulic press that stomps him into the ground. It is difficult to claim that there is equality of opportunity, let alone gender equality.
A later painting cycle by Botero was sparked by the scandalous news from the Iraqi prison Abu Ghraib. Fernando Botero admitted in an interview that the torture carried out by the American soldiers came as a shock to him. He is becoming more and more sensitive to injustice. Zorn painted these pictures. Men blindfolded, tortured, bloodied, tied up, naked, one in women’s underwear. The massive human forms have become shapeless mountains of flesh.
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Nothing would be more inaccurate than a portrait of the painter as a cheerful inhabitant of the edge of the world. The fact that the notorious corpulence of his characters can be the best painterly entertainment is as undeniable as their origins in the baroque transformation of Latin American culture. Only when one digs into the Colombian roots of this work does the voluptuous figure writing gain its true meaning. As a defense of the sensual body against the Puritan spirit, as a triumph of emphatic play over the barren metaphors of reason, as a victory of Hispanic-American grandeur over the ascetic rationality of North America.
Fernando Botero wanted to paint like the Old Masters and be an artist like the artists of his time. As intimately familiar with the artistic heritage of the European Renaissance as with the sublime color spaces of abstract expressionism, the painter developed his means between the spheres of influence of the art world.
Berlin in 2007: Fernando Botero in front of one of his sculptures
Source: picture-alliance/Rainer Jensen/dpa
To describe only the Latin American references would be to overlook the school of Dürer, Cranach and Velazquez, to which Botero attended with admiration. The actual location of the work lies in the autonomous in-between, in the equidistance to the regions and epochs, in the self-chosen distance from the impulses and suggestions of the time. The young Botero sided with Picasso so much that they expelled him from the Jesuit college. He was closely familiar with the late Braque. Friend for a long time with Rothko, Franz Kline and de Kooning.
And yet no one and nothing was able to distract him from his character theme. And no lawyer, no familiarity and friendship with modernity prevented the painter from painting a bloated postscript to Dürer’s famous “Elisabeth Tucher” portrait and from imagining Leonardo’s famous “Mona Lisa” at the chubby age of twelve. Now the artist has died at the age of 91.
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