Beyond form: the Universe according to Botero

The exhibition at the Palau Martorell in Barcelona is the first after the painter's death and covers his entire career through paintings, watercolors, drawings and sculptures

(Medellín, 1932-Monaco, 2023) wanted to be a bullfighter before being a painter. At the age of 12 he enrolled in the bullfighting school in Medellín but soon realized that his true arena was not the bullring but painting. He soon left school to sit in front of the bullring, where he began drawing his first watercolors around the bullfight, a theme that has been recurring during a career that spanned more than seven decades.

A little over a year has passed since his death and the most universal Colombian painter returns to the art scene thanks to Fernando Botero. The Universal Master, an exhibition curated by Cristina Carrillo de Albornoz, an expert on his work, and Lina Botero, the painter's daughter, which brings together more than 110 works - including paintings, drawings, watercolours, charcoals and sculptures - and which can be seen until 20 July at the Palau Martorell in Barcelona. Divided into ten sections, it is a tour of his most recurrent themes: Latin America, the circus, religion and still life.

Although Botero is known for his large volumes, his first influences include artists such as Gauguin. “When he was 15 or 16 he had a romantic vision of painting and on weekends he would go out into the countryside with his friends, they felt like European artists even though they had not seen his works because in Medellín at that time there were no important museums,” recalls Lina Botero.
At that time he also showed interest in Picasso, an artist who motivated a nearly month-long boat trip to Spain at the age of 20. “He arrived in Barcelona and the first painting he saw was one by Picasso. He only stayed for three days and then moved on to Madrid,” recalls Cristina Carrillo de Albornoz.
In the Spanish capital he entered the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando but soon realised that “he would learn more in museums than in classrooms,” notes Lina Botero. With an insatiable interest in art, Botero visited the Prado Museum every day and tried to copy works by artists such as Velázquez, Titian and Goya. “Velázquez is the ultimate master, he shows you the path to excellence and that through painting you can achieve the sublime,” adds Carrillo de Albornoz.
One afternoon, as he left the Prado Museum, he passed a bookshop and stopped in front of an open book with a work by Piero della Francesca. “The image had such an impact on him that the next day he bought the book and made a decision: he took the Vespa and went to Italy with a friend to learn about the Quattrocento,” says Lina Botero. It was in Florence, painting tirelessly and studying Renaissance treatises, that he understood the importance of volume. “Then he understood that he was on the right path, but he had to find his own volume,” adds Carrillo de Albornoz.
The beginning of Boteroism

The trip through Europe in 1952 was revealing and allowed him to reinterpret the great masters of painting. Some of the outstanding pieces in the exhibition are Menina, according to Velázquez, a canvas that has presided over his Paris studio for more than 40 years and which is being exhibited in public for the first time.

Another of the unpublished works in this exhibition is Homage to Mantegna, which won the Annual Salon of Colombia in 1958 and whose whereabouts were unknown until Lina Botero located it in a private collection in America. When Botero first saw Andrea Mantegna's frescoes, he was perplexed and made several versions of his works. Like all of the artist's works, it is a very personal version of one of the frescoes that decorate the Chamber of the Spouses of the Ducal Palace of Mantua.

When he ran out of money, Botero returned to Colombia, met his wife and moved to Mexico, "the mecca of Latin American art at the time." There he learned about the work of Mexican muralists and how they looked at their own reality and roots. That influence, together with the discovery of the volume in Italy that marked the beginning of Boteroism, led him to understand that his life and his own experiences could be the protagonists of his work. Colour and serenity

The exhibition also brings together his iconic series in which he addresses his most recurrent themes such as Latin America, the circus, religion and still life. These constants, together with his particular use of colour and the hieratic serenity of his figures, mark the features of his work. “It seems that his characters have no expression but Botero did not want to focus the expression on the face but on the entire painting,” recalls Cristina Carrillo de Albornoz.

Although master painters such as Velázquez and the Renaissance artists were Botero's great references, his work is based on memory and recollections, on the European and Latin American artistic tradition. In works such as the diptych According to Piero della Francesca (1998) he includes the landscapes of Antioch, while Latin American forests sneak into other works.
Botero and social denunciation

Convinced that art should ennoble life and produce pleasure, Botero made two parenthesis to denounce the violence in Colombia and the torture of American soldiers in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, which he learned about while reading a report in The New Yorker magazine during a flight from Paris to New York. “He felt such a great shock that he immediately took a notebook to start drawing. He knew that he had to denounce these episodes, that painting was a platform for the world to know what was happening,” says Cristina Carrillo de Albornoz.
Botero created a series of sixty drawings that he donated to the Brooklyn Museum of Art and another ten to a museum in Washington. “In Barcelona you can see the remains of that collection. He never wanted to sell those pieces because he did not want to profit from the pain of others,” says Lina Botero, who in recent months has been working on the creation of the Fernando Botero Foundation, through which she wants to keep Fernando Botero's legacy alive.
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