Colombia moves with me
An interview with Fernando Botero at his first solo exhibition in Budapest
MúzeumCafé 20.
One day a grumpy bull had the chance to intervene in art history: a 14-year-old novillero, an apprentice matador, decided after meeting him that he’d rather choose drawing on paper than drawing blood. Within two years the signature of Fernando Botero could be seen at a group exhibition of an amateur art school in Medellín, Colombia.
– Is it true that you were kicked out of school because of Picasso?
– The head teacher was really irritated when he saw an article of mine praising the avant-garde genius. Of course, my enthusiasm for Dalí in my next writing did not improve my position, neither did my earlier illustrations depicting naked figures in the Sunday literary supplement of El Colombiano. Both were regarded as a sacrilege.
– You probably didn’t experience such trials in the school for matadors.
– There everything went alright until I faced a bull during the first practice lesson. So it came in handy that I just happened to inherit my brothers hand-down brushes and paint. Bulls and matadors took their final place in my life. On the drawing paper.
– You soon moved to Bogota where, hardly 20, you won the second prize at the national art review after your first solo exhibition.
– I exchanged it for a boat ticket to Europe, more precisely I travelled to Barcelona on third class. I could hardly wait to flee the complete isolation which Colombia represented at the time. In Medellín there were no fine arts museums or artists; at most, amateur teachers were painting in their leisure time. I stared at the angles borrowed from Spanish Baroque painting in the lavishly gilded churches. But don’t misunderstand me, it wasn’t the difference between South American and European art that astonished me, but what I saw. Contemporary Colombian art did not exist, there was no basis for comparison apart from pre-Colombian, Indian and folk art traditions. At the age of 19 I started off with a clean slate and was open to everything on that boat heading for Europe. I was not attached to anything, but interested in everything.
– You didn’t take berth with contemporary art for some time. You copied paintings by Titian, Tintoretto, Velázquez and Rubens in the Prado.
– I wanted to study and although I enrolled in Madrid’s Academy of Arts, I thought it was a better idea to chose the old masters and rather observe their technical tricks. In addition there was always someone among the enthusiastic tourists to buy my pictures. Then I moved to Paris and continued to be self-taught at the Louvre until, during an evening walk, I happened to stumble on something I was really looking for in a bookshop window. I myself didn’t know what it was exactly. It only turned out the following day when I returned. The picture was The Meeting of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, a key painting of Piero della Francesca, a prominent artist of the Florentine early Renaissance. I immediately got packing. Two years followed in Florence and I was enchanted by the sensual and animated abundance of the Renaissance. There I acquired the attitude of looking at life that I still build on. I learnt traditional oil painting technique and fresco painting at the same time. I copied Giotto and in my free time I rode my motorbike to the former Renaissance centres. After Florence I returned home but couldn’t get settled. I won the grand prize of the 1958 Colombian review with the enlarged figures of Mantegna’s fresco, only because the jury changed its earlier rejection following a scandal in the press. Later, when I spent more than 10 years in New York, I worked in a similar vacuum. Do you want to know why I still insisted on New York? You had to be there. That was the centre of the art world. Of course, if you were there at the time and didn’t believe in Abstract Expressionism you didn’t exist. I rarely use models when I paint. A body is an object rather than a depiction of a given person. I need forms, a figure is part of the composition. By the way, Rubens, Brueghel and Giotto painted the same human shapes. When Cézanne painted his wife he asked her to sit there like an apple and become part of the still life. Nevertheless, if I happen to use a model I usually ask him or her not to open their eyes until I’ve sketched the body. A glance is so suggestive that it distracts attention from everything else.
– Why are you so adamant in asserting that you are not painting fat people? Why do you shy away from this adjective so much?
– Because it makes the essence of my artistic credo trivial. I ha- ven’t simply fattened my characters but deformed them as a result of the effect of Renaissance abundance. I’ve changed proportion and scale: while I enlarge, I reduce certain details. I realized this duality one day in the 50s while drawing a mandolin. I achieved the effect of ample quantity by shrinking the sound-hole under the strings, making it absolutely tiny. I deformed it. That’s the essence of art.