Fernando Botero: The Complete Story
Fernando Botero (1932-2023) was the Colombian painter and sculptor of swollen, weightless volume, the most recognized Latin American artist of his time, and far darker than the roundness suggests: he painted Pablo Escobar's death and the abuses of Abu Ghraib.
The style has a birthday, and it involves a mandolin.
Fernando Botero at a glance
1932. Born in Medellín, Colombia. His father, a traveling salesman, died when he was four.
1944. Enrolled at twelve in Medellín’s matador school. It did not take.
1956. Painted Still Life with Mandolin in Mexico City, the small holed mandolin where the volume began.
1974. His four year old son Pedro died in a car accident in Spain, a grief he painted for years.
2023. Died at 91. He is buried in Pietrasanta, the Italian town where he cast his bronzes.
A mandolin with a tiny hole
Born in Medellin in 1932 and briefly enrolled in bullfighting school as a boy, Botero was drawing matadors for pocket money by his teens.
The revelation came in 1956: sketching a mandolin, he drew the sound hole tiny, and the instrument ballooned into monumental volume. Boterismo, the inflation of everything, was born on that sheet.
Not fat, he insisted: volume
He spent seventy years correcting the same misunderstanding. The figures are not fat people, he said; they are volume, a sensual exaggeration of form in the spirit of the Italian masters he copied as a student in Florence.
The proof is that everything swells equally in his world: oranges, horses, priests, mountains, even the rain.
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The dark Botero
The roundness carried violence when he chose. He painted the death of Pablo Escobar over the Medellin rooftops, the earthquake-struck and the kidnapped of Colombia's wars, and in 2005, in his seventies, some eighty works on the torture at Abu Ghraib, later donated to the University of California, Berkeley because he refused to profit from them.
The gifts
He gave his art away on a scale with the figures.
In 2000 he donated over two hundred works, his own and his private collection of Picasso, Monet and Chagall among others, to found the Museo Botero in Bogota and refill the Museo de Antioquia in Medellin, both free to enter at his insistence.
He died in Monaco in September 2023, at 91.
The matador school
At twelve, Botero was sent to Medellín’s school for bullfighters.
He lasted long enough to learn the poses, then discovered he preferred drawing the bulls to facing them.
His first sold works were watercolors of the ring, and bullfight scenes returned across his whole career.
Pedrito, painted and repainted
In 1974 a car accident in Spain killed his youngest son, Pedro, age four, and mangled the painter’s right hand.
Botero painted the boy again and again afterward, in sailor suits, on toy horses, at giant scale.
He gave a group of the Pedrito works to the Museo de Antioquia in Medellín, where they hang together.
Pietrasanta, the bronze summers
For decades Botero spent part of each year in Pietrasanta, the Tuscan town that has cast sculpture since Michelangelo’s marble days.
His monumental bronzes, the cats, the horses, the reclining women, were born in its foundries.
He is buried there beside his wife, the sculptor Sophia Vari, who died the same year.
Where to see Botero
The Museo Botero in Bogota and the Museo de Antioquia in Medellin, with the sculpture-lined Plaza Botero outside it, hold the world's deepest collections. His bronzes stand from Park Avenue to Singapore.
The Fernando Botero questions that keep coming up
What is Botero famous for? Boterismo: paintings and bronzes of inflated, monumental figures.
Why did he paint fat figures? He insisted they are not fat but volume, an exaggeration of form for sensuality and presence.
Did Botero paint serious subjects? Yes: Colombian violence, the death of Escobar, and some eighty Abu Ghraib works he donated to Berkeley.
Where can I see his work? The Museo Botero in Bogota and the Museo de Antioquia and Plaza Botero in Medellin.
Did Botero train as a bullfighter? Briefly. He entered Medellín’s matador school at twelve, kept the imagery, and dropped the career.
Where is Botero buried? In Pietrasanta, Italy, the bronze casting town where he worked every summer, beside his wife, the sculptor Sophia Vari.
More secrets to unlock
The wound and the answer
In 1995 a bomb hidden under his bronze dove in Medellin killed twenty-three people. Botero asked that the shattered bird stay exactly where it stood, and in 2000 placed an identical, intact dove beside it. The pair still stand together: the wound and the answer.
