By Mike Phipps

Fernando Botero died on September 15^th at the age of 91. The Colombian figurative artist and sculptor had an instantly recognisable style, although its popularity and accessibility meant he wasn’t always beloved of art critics and the wider art establishment. The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones, for example, dismissed him with a throwaway reference to a British artist noted for her comical works: “Botero’s style, with its inflated, monumental figures, makes me think of Beryl Cook.”

It’s true that there is a humour and eccentricity in Botero’s paintings. But above all, there is a boundless humanity, a sympathy for ordinary people in ordinary situations. Botero himself came from a modest background. He was born in 1932 in the industrial city of Medellin. His mother was a seamstress and his father was a salesman who travelled around on horseback and died of a heart attack when Fernando was just four years old.

Fernando’s boyhood ambition was to be a bullfighter but gradually art, for which he had a real talent,  took over his life. Largely self-taught, he did illustrative work for local newspapers to pay his way through college, and held his first exhibition at age 19. His second show, a year later, sold out. With the money he made, he sailed to Europe to study the great European Masters.

When he returned four years later, his classical style was not popular and did not sell: he even had to take a job as a used car dealer to make ends meet. Gradually he developed his own inimitable style of inflating the size of what he was depicting: Boterismo.

A short-lived marriage into the moneyed elite gave him some financial stability but it finished four years later. Botero moved to the US in 1960 and lived a frugal and solitary life, gradually establishing himself. In 1964, he began to make sculptures, but lack of money initially prevented him from working with bronze, so he made his sculptures with acrylic resin and sawdust.

His quirky style may have seemed to be at odds with the serious content he was creating, but the effect of the combination could be dramatic and moving.

Colombia at this time was characterised by very high levels of violence. Up to 300,000 people are estimated to have been killed in the decade after the 1948 assassination of Jorge Gaitán, a popular left wing Liberal Party presidential candidate. Violent conflict continued over the next fifty years, involving Colombian state forces, far right paramilitaries, crime organisations and left wing guerrillas. A further 220,000 people were killed between 1958 and 2013, overwhelmingly by right wing paramilitaries, the majority civilians. Over 5 million people were forced to flee their homes.

The scale of the violence meant everybody was affected and Botero was no exception. In 1995 a bomb containing 10 kg of dynamite was placed underneath his bronze sculpture The Bird, which was on display in Medellín’s Plaza San Antonio. The resulting explosion killed 23 people and injured 200 more. The perpetrators were never identified, although the chief of the Cali cocaine cartel had been arrested just 24 hours earlier. A horrified Botero decided that the damaged sculpture should be left in place as a “monument to the country’s imbecility and criminality” and donated an intact replica to stand alongside it.

In 2004, Botero produced his own response to his country’s troubles, exhibiting a series of 27 drawings and 23 paintings dealing with the violence in Colombia from 1999 to 2004. He donated the works to the National Museum of Colombia. He was a strong believer in art for everybody and regularly donated work to public collections.

In 2005 he completed a controversial series of over 85 paintings and 100 drawings which depicted stylized renditions of prisoner abuse by American guards at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. I saw these works in Valencia shortly after they were made and found them powerful and shocking. The sheer volume of paintings underline the widespread and routine nature of the abuse, for which no senior US personnel has ever been held to account.

Botero was inspired to create his Abu Ghraib series after reading US journalist Seymour Hersh’s account of the official US report into events at the prison which itemised the abuse in graphic detail:

“Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.”

Botero explained his motivation for the works in 2007, saying, “The whole world and myself were very shocked that the Americans were torturing prisoners in the same prison as the tyrant they came to remove.” He added: “Anti-American it’s not. Anti-brutality, anti-inhumanity, yes.”

Botero’s paintings of the abuse are more monumental than the stark photographs that appeared of Abu Ghraib at the time. The US guards are rarely shown: the focus is on the suffering of the prisoners, an approach which also implicates any system that would allow such torture.

The works show naked, blindfolded, hooded and handcuffed prisoners, bruised and bleeding, being kicked or piled up. They are often life-size, a scale that magnifies both their suffering and their human essence. “They restore the prisoners’ dignity and humanity without diminishing their agony or the injustice of their situation,” opined the New York Times.

It’s a hugely impressive collection of work that has been compared to Goya’s famous series of engravings The Disasters of War. Once seen they are unlikely to be forgotten.

In his last decade, Botero’s paintings could sell for over a million dollars. Yet those who knew him said the artist retained his sincerity and simplicity. The announcement of his death saw Botero hailed as a genius and “the greatest Colombian artist of all time”.

Art critic Robert Hughes closed the second episode of his ground-breaking  1980 series The Shock of the New, now being shown again on BBC4, with the words, “It’s hard to think of any work of art of which one can say… ‘This saved the life of one Jew or one Vietnamese.’ Books perhaps, but as far as I know, no paintings or sculptures. The difference between us and the artists of the twenties is that they though that such a work of art could be made. Perhaps it was their naivety that they could think so, but it’s our loss that we can’t.”

Botero understood this. He said once, “I know I’m not going to change anything; art does not have that power.”  But at its best, his work attempted to bring to the attention of the world some of the worst injustices of our time in a direct and accessible way that demanded they be remembered and addressed.

“Art is important,” Botero said, “because when people start to forget, art reminds them what happened. Like Guernica. People would not remember the tragedy of Guernica today if it were not for that painting.”

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.

Main image: Creator: Sylvain van Eeckhout | Credit: Culturespaces. Copyright: Culturespaces. Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) . Sculpture of The Bird, by Fernando Botero, the original blown up by the Medellín mafia and the reconstruction. Author: Roapolice, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Botero Museum, Bogota, Colombia. https://www.flickr.com/photos/113306963@N05/38310105096 . Creator: travelmag.com. Copyright: Florent MECHAIN. Licence: Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) Abu Ghraib image: Abu Ghraib 01, 2004.https://www.flickr.com/photos/rocor/41059589720. Creator: Rob Corder. Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.0)