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拍品專文
Painted in 1975 while the artist was living in Paris, Fernando Botero's monumental The Botero Exhibition stretches across a canvas just under two metres in width. In this richly detailed composition, Botero transports the viewer into an exhibition space, where ten of his own works adorn the central wall. Perusing the gallery are eight figures – characters who recur throughout Botero’s paintings; smoking gentlemen, bourgeois women, Renaissance-style religious figures, and a family group. Each appears to have a foil, a correlating, reflected presence in the same scale, with the exception of the central figures – a jacketed man, who, mirroring the onlooker, stands square to the painting in front of him, and his infant daughter, who, wide-eyed with a child’s curiosity, gazes out over his shoulder at the viewer.
The Botero Exhibition pays homage to the tradition of Kunstkammer paintings, which showcased an individual’s collection with replicas of the artworks they owned displayed together. In the present work, Botero has used printed images of his own paintings, collaging the cut-outs onto the canvas. These juxtaposed reproductions are not reflective of the scale of their original counterparts, should they be hung together, which imbues the work with a surreal quality. Botero took the print copies from contemporary literature and exhibition catalogues featuring his works, some of which were reproduced in print in monochrome, while others have changed colour over time, with only the blue and white ink remaining. The small ‘36’ in the lower right corner of the reproduction of Pope Leo X (after Raphael) suggests that this image in particular was taken from the 1970 Galerie Buchholz publication, Fernando Botero, where the photograph and layout match the picture in The Botero Exhibition.
Botero appears to have created the composition through a thoughtful layering process; the frames and mounts of the exhibited pictures were painted before the pasting of the reproductions, which have been cut to the silhouette of the character who stands in front of them. Yet, some of these figures were finalised after the addition of the collage elements, as the peak of a hat, or a lock of hair, skirts onto the reproduced image. For the artist, whose recognisably voluptuous figures have always attracted attention, volume and depth were of incessant significance, and he sought to ‘create a language of plasticity that would be effective and that people would be touched by’ (Botero, quoted in an interview with I. Sischy, ‘An Interview with Fernando Botero,’ Artforum, May 1985, p. 72). In The Botero Exhibition, the artist’s inventive use of media not only acts as modernising take on an art historical tradition, but furthers his exploration of plasticity in his work. A vivid three-dimensionality is created by the dialogue between the glossy sheen of the collaged reproductions, and the rich, curving brushstrokes of the oil paint.
Art history was of significant interest and importance to Botero, who felt that any artist is a collector of all the art that preceded them. As a child, he had been transfixed by the copies of European paintings that hung in his local church. His interest in Western art history was later spurred on by friends from the Medellín literary supplement he illustrated, who introduced him to the modernist works of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Aged eighteen, Botero embarked on a European ‘grand tour,’ spending a year at the prestigious Academia San Fernando in Madrid, although he preferred to study directly from the Spanish masters, Diego Velázquez and Francisco de Goya, whose works hung in the Prado. It was also in Madrid that he discovered the artists of the Early Renaissance, and so, after a pitstop in Paris, Botero continued his tour in Northern Italy by motorcycle.
As a result of Botero’s passionate interest and study of art history, the artist often consciously recalled his artistic forebearers in his compositions. In the present work, the central collaged painting, Le déjeuner sur l’herbe is Botero’s direct reference to Edouard Manet’s famous painting from the mid-nineteenth century, while topping the column of monochrome cut-outs is the artist’s Pope Leo X (after Raphael), a reinterpretation of Raphael’s 1518 portrait of the Pope, and to the left, Botero’s Sunflowers remembers Vincent van Gogh’s Les Tournesols series. In addition to invoking iconic artworks, Botero depicted art historical subject matters and ideas throughout his oeuvre, and all the pictures that hang in The Botero Exhibition exemplify the constant conversation in his work between the art of the past and the present. For Botero, his own exhibitions offered the platform to continue this dialogue, as well as the opportunity for reflection and redirection. As Klaus Gallwitz has noted, the artist often went ‘to see his own shows… he says the “focus” an exhibition gives him on his recent work helps him decide where to go next’ (quoted in Fernando Botero, London, 1976, p. 21). In depicting an exhibition of his own paintings which consciously reference the Western art historical canon, Botero not only aligned himself with the annals of European art history, but he also created an open invitation to the conversation on the very concept and purpose of art.
The Botero Exhibition pays homage to the tradition of Kunstkammer paintings, which showcased an individual’s collection with replicas of the artworks they owned displayed together. In the present work, Botero has used printed images of his own paintings, collaging the cut-outs onto the canvas. These juxtaposed reproductions are not reflective of the scale of their original counterparts, should they be hung together, which imbues the work with a surreal quality. Botero took the print copies from contemporary literature and exhibition catalogues featuring his works, some of which were reproduced in print in monochrome, while others have changed colour over time, with only the blue and white ink remaining. The small ‘36’ in the lower right corner of the reproduction of Pope Leo X (after Raphael) suggests that this image in particular was taken from the 1970 Galerie Buchholz publication, Fernando Botero, where the photograph and layout match the picture in The Botero Exhibition.
Botero appears to have created the composition through a thoughtful layering process; the frames and mounts of the exhibited pictures were painted before the pasting of the reproductions, which have been cut to the silhouette of the character who stands in front of them. Yet, some of these figures were finalised after the addition of the collage elements, as the peak of a hat, or a lock of hair, skirts onto the reproduced image. For the artist, whose recognisably voluptuous figures have always attracted attention, volume and depth were of incessant significance, and he sought to ‘create a language of plasticity that would be effective and that people would be touched by’ (Botero, quoted in an interview with I. Sischy, ‘An Interview with Fernando Botero,’ Artforum, May 1985, p. 72). In The Botero Exhibition, the artist’s inventive use of media not only acts as modernising take on an art historical tradition, but furthers his exploration of plasticity in his work. A vivid three-dimensionality is created by the dialogue between the glossy sheen of the collaged reproductions, and the rich, curving brushstrokes of the oil paint.
Art history was of significant interest and importance to Botero, who felt that any artist is a collector of all the art that preceded them. As a child, he had been transfixed by the copies of European paintings that hung in his local church. His interest in Western art history was later spurred on by friends from the Medellín literary supplement he illustrated, who introduced him to the modernist works of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Aged eighteen, Botero embarked on a European ‘grand tour,’ spending a year at the prestigious Academia San Fernando in Madrid, although he preferred to study directly from the Spanish masters, Diego Velázquez and Francisco de Goya, whose works hung in the Prado. It was also in Madrid that he discovered the artists of the Early Renaissance, and so, after a pitstop in Paris, Botero continued his tour in Northern Italy by motorcycle.
As a result of Botero’s passionate interest and study of art history, the artist often consciously recalled his artistic forebearers in his compositions. In the present work, the central collaged painting, Le déjeuner sur l’herbe is Botero’s direct reference to Edouard Manet’s famous painting from the mid-nineteenth century, while topping the column of monochrome cut-outs is the artist’s Pope Leo X (after Raphael), a reinterpretation of Raphael’s 1518 portrait of the Pope, and to the left, Botero’s Sunflowers remembers Vincent van Gogh’s Les Tournesols series. In addition to invoking iconic artworks, Botero depicted art historical subject matters and ideas throughout his oeuvre, and all the pictures that hang in The Botero Exhibition exemplify the constant conversation in his work between the art of the past and the present. For Botero, his own exhibitions offered the platform to continue this dialogue, as well as the opportunity for reflection and redirection. As Klaus Gallwitz has noted, the artist often went ‘to see his own shows… he says the “focus” an exhibition gives him on his recent work helps him decide where to go next’ (quoted in Fernando Botero, London, 1976, p. 21). In depicting an exhibition of his own paintings which consciously reference the Western art historical canon, Botero not only aligned himself with the annals of European art history, but he also created an open invitation to the conversation on the very concept and purpose of art.