On Friday, artist Fernando Botero passed away at a hospital in Monaco from complications due to pneumonia, according to his daughter, Lina Botero. He was 91. An iconic painter and sculptor who found international success pushing the boundaries of volume and form with his voluptuous figures, Botero made instantly recognizable artworks that have been a source of delight to viewers and collectors for some 70 years.
As a girl growing up in Medellín, Colombia, in the 1990s, when the city was widely considered one of the most violent places in the world, associated with drug cartels, murders, kidnapping, and cocaine, finding reasons to feel proud of my hometown wasn’t exactly easy. Yet Botero made it possible.
Though he ventured into a wide range of themes and scenes in his work, including representations of world-famous characters like Marie Antoinette and the Mona Lisa, many of Botero’s most impactful pieces were rich with political undertones and a satirical sense of humor. With his whimsical spheroidal subjects, he depicted scenes of war, corruption scandals, and political rivalries, as well as those capturing the joys of everyday life, honoring the beauty and messiness of our country’s reality at a time when few Colombians believed art could be about us, let alone for us.
“Botero’s satire is not heavy-handed,” art critic Peter Schjeldahl once wrote, “though it is blatant, because his paintings work finally like dreams rather than like cartoons. There is something about his silly, fleshy monsters that is intimate and familiar, a faintly scary reminder of the self in one of its primitive guises.”
Born on April 19, 1932, in Medellín, Botero was enrolled in bullfighting school by his uncle at age 12 before realizing, a couple of years later, that he wanted to devote his life to art instead. At 19, he had his first solo art show at Leo Matiz’s gallery in Bogotá, and in 1952, he won second place at the Salon Nacional de Artistas, a prestigious cultural event, which prompted him to travel to Europe and study in Madrid, Florence, and Paris.
He began to develop his exaggerated style—now known globally as Boterismo—while living in Mexico in the 1960s. The story goes that he was first inclined to experiment with proportions while drawing a hole in a mandolin that didn’t quite match the size of the rest of the instrument. “There was something exciting about the dynamic of plasticity in these wild proportions,” he explained in an interview with Artforum in 1985. “I had been looking for a way to create a language of plasticity that would be effective and that people would be touched by since I decided to be an artist.”
His exaggerated, spherical figures, rendered in a kaleidoscopic color palette, first brought him significant attention in 1961, when Dorothy C. Miller, a curator from the Museum of Modern Art, purchased his painting Mona Lisa, Age Twelve (1959). But it wasn’t until 1972 that Botero had his first major show, at the Marlborough Gallery in New York City. A retrospective of his work at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., would follow in 1979, and in the early ’90s, his oversized sculptures were exhibited along the Champs-Élysées in Paris and Park Avenue in New York.
Despite the severe reactions of some art critics who didn’t see the value in his aesthetic and dismissed it as vapid and uninteresting—art critic Rosalind Krauss famously described Botero’s work as “terrible,” comparing it to images of the Pillsbury Doughboy—he became an art-market powerhouse whose output was valued at millions of dollars. Just last year, his sculpture Man on a Horse (1999) sold for $4.3 million at Christie’s.
In line with the paisa spirit (a demonym used to describe people from Medellín), Botero was a profoundly hard worker. He produced thousands of pieces over the course of his decades-long career, and well into his 80s he was known to spend entire days in his studio, laboring over his canvases and sculptures. “Fernando Botero is one of the most disciplined people you can meet. His friends and family affirm that he works every day of every year,” his son Juan Carlos Botero wrote in The Art of Fernando Botero, a book about the artist’s life published in 2013. “For Botero there are no rest dates, no holidays, no weekends.”
Even beyond Botero’s economic success and international fame, however, was the important trail he blazed for other Latin American artists. “We Latin American artists have a need to find our own authenticity—some position that is not colonial,” Botero once said. “I want to paint anything I feel like…but with the hope that everything I do will be touched by this Latin American spirit.”
Botero is survived by three children from his first marriage to Gloria Zea—Fernando, Lina, and Juan Carlos—as well as his brother, Rodrigo, and his grandchildren.