This is an article from Turning Points, a special series that reflects on what this year’s critical moments could mean for the next. You can read more by visiting the series page.
In a panegyric written for Colombian artist Fernando Botero, his son Juan Carlos Botero recalled that his father had a favorite saying: “One must live in love with life.”
“That phrase always surprised me,” wrote the young Botero, “because it was said by a man who lost his father at the age of four, who lived in poverty for decades, who lost his son – my little brother – also at the age of four, and who fought against everything and everyone without ever giving up his convictions, and without knowing if he would ever experience a minimum of well-being or acceptance. That’s what my father said, over and over again: ‘To live in love with life’.”
Fernando Botero passed away on September 15 at the age of 91 in Monaco, where he had a house.
Botero, one of the world’s most well-known and commercially successful artists, created works that have fetched seven-figure prices at auctions for years, and his sculpture exhibitions – including a display of 14 bronze pieces on Park Avenue in New York City and a show of over 30 sculptures on the Champs-Elysées in Paris – always drew large crowds. But it was painting, which he often said he loved above all else and continued to do until his final days, that remained central to Botero’s life. His unique aesthetic, with voluminous and bulbous figures, occasionally attracted detractors, many of them art critics, but his admirers always far outnumbered them.
Born in Medellín, Colombia, in 1932, Botero began his career there as a teenager, creating illustrations for a newspaper and painting bullfighting scenes to sell at La Macarena, the city’s bullring.
As he entered his tenth decade, we asked Botero in early 2023 if he would be willing to speak with The New York Times about his legacy and his impact on the art world. We interviewed him via email and began by asking him to select a work of his that best exemplified his career. He chose a painting he completed in 2000, “Taller de costura” (Sewing Workshop).
Excerpts from the conversation have been edited for clarity and space.
“Taller de costura” is a great example of “boterismo”: your unique style, with vibrant colors and voluminous proportions. What does this artwork convey about your life as an artist and your legacy?
This artwork, like all the others, is a statement of principles. In other words, it is a kind of manifesto about how painting should be, in my opinion. I believe that painting embodies the synthesis of color, composition, form, and drawing, and all of that is revealed and expressed in style. The subject is just a pretext for painting.
This painting has autobiographical elements, as it depicts a sewing workshop with three assistants, like the one my mother had, who was widowed at a very young age. This is not strange, by the way. The central theme of my work is the Latin America that I experienced in my youth, and that is why images of my life in Colombia often appear in my oils and drawings.
In my family, there were never any painters or intellectuals. My father was a traveling salesman who moved through the mountains of Antioquia with several mules full of merchandise. I remember very little about him, I was only four years old when he died, but I do remember the place where the mules were and his assistant, an old man named don Antonio.
When my father died, we (my mother, my two brothers, and I) were plunged into poverty, and my mother supported us with her sewing talent, as depicted in this painting. In any case, my paintings are populated with these memories and many others, because my homeland has always been, as I say, the raw material of my art.
As for my legacy, I believe it will be my entire body of work, created in a consistent manner with my convictions and coherent with my ideas.
Could you tell us how you perfected this style? How did the idea of focusing on volume come about? What made amplified proportions a central aspect of your aesthetic?
Volume was an essential aspect of ancient Greek and Roman art. Its presence disappeared during the Middle Ages and was only rediscovered centuries later thanks to the early Renaissance artists, starting with Giotto. From that moment on, its prevalence remained intact until the emergence of abstract art in the 20th century.
For me, however, this aspect remains the most essential. And not only because it allows the creation of the third dimension and the optical illusion of roundness and depth on the flat surface of the canvas, but because it communicates beauty and sensuality, which are the cardinal goals of each of my works.
In that sense, it was fortunate that I read Bernard Berenson, the famous American art historian and critic, when I was 18 years old. Because Berenson gave me intellectual clarity and philosophical depth to what, until then, had only been a preference or intuitive inclination. Berenson made a true apology for volume and its ability to communicate what he called “tactile values” to the painting. The reading of his essays marked me forever.
The fact is that, as a modern artist, I have the license to take my passion to the extreme, and that is why volume predominates in all my work. My interest has nothing to do with what some believe to be “fatness.” Fatness and volume are two very different things because while the former uglifies objects, the latter awakens the desire to touch and conveys beauty and sensuality.
In addition, volume allows for the exaltation of reality. As I have said on other occasions, an apple painted by a master – huge, colossal, and voluminous – is more apple than the simple fruit of everyday life. That is the essence of my aesthetic proposal: to exalt volume to communicate beauty and sensuality, and to convey a sense of monumentality.
As you rightly point out, the memories of your youth deeply influenced your work, including the colonial architecture of Medellín and the shapes and colors of the bullring. In fact, some of your early paintings were of bullfighters. Could you tell us more about the ways in which the city and life in Colombia inspired your work?
I believe that to be universal, one must start by being parochial, that is, local, and belong to a specific land. That is why we love the art of ancient Greece, the archaic art of China, and the archaic art of India because they were authentic and local creations.
Goya’s art belongs to Spain, and Monet’s art belongs to France. Those artists achieved universality through the particular representation of their own world because by touching the roots of their land, they touched the deepest and most common fibers of all people.
In my adolescence, Medellín was a provincial city, very isolated from the rest of the country by the mountains that surround it and make the construction of roads and highways so difficult. In the endless parades of the city’s national or religious festivals, the mayor of the town seemed like the president, and the bishop seemed like the pope. Going to mass [on those occasions] was like going to the movies for me, and all the elements of that society left a very deep impression on my memory.
At that time, bullfights were very popular. One day, an uncle took me to the La Macarena bullring, and I liked the spectacle so much that I decided to become a bullfighter. That, of course, didn’t last long, but the experience made me a fan of bullfighting for the rest of my life.
At the age of 15, I started painting small watercolors of the bullfight that were sold at Rafael Pérez’s tailor shop, where you could also buy tickets to the bullring…