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拍品專文
On October 1, 1960, a 28-year-old Fernando Botero arrived in New York City from Bogotá with three suits, $200 in his pocket and dogged ambition. He came with no family, no friends and no English. Quickly though, he found a small studio on MacDougal St. in Greenwich Village and set to work painting day in and day out. “En Nueva York, desde el comienzo trabajé todo el tiempo. Pinté y dibujé con una ferocidad grande porque esta ciudad, si uno no hace un esfuerzo mayor, lo aplasta. Yo soy un sobreviviente.” [In New York, from the beginning, I worked all the time. I painted and drew with a great ferocity because this city, if one does not make the most effort, it crushes you. I am a survivor.] (Fernando Botero in José Hernández, “Nueva York treinta años después” El tiempo, 1 de septiembre 1993). For the next twelve years, in a city where Abstract Expressionism and later Pop reigned supreme, Fernando Botero, who painted far outside the circumscribed lines of art history, did more than survive. After two years spent counting pennies, eating only hot dogs and eliminating red (the most expensive paint color, according to the artist) from his work, he had a major break. Dorothy Miller, a noted curator from the Museum of Modern Art, found her way to the maverick artist’s studio and immediately bought Mona Lisa, a los doce años for her storied institution.
While Miller opened the door to the hallowed halls of modernism, a second encounter a few years later proved to be the turning point in Botero’s career. The wildly successful music publishing executive Jean Aberbach happened upon a group exhibition at MOMA that included Botero’s The Presidential Family, the second work by the artist to enter the museum’s collection. Aberbach would later describe his encounter with the painting as an almost transcendental experience. “[After leaving the painting], I walked back into the darkness and the rain, and my cheeks reached out for the raindrops and my heart was filled with happiness and expectation.” (Jean Aberbach in B. Biszick-Lockwood, Restless Giant: The Life and Times of Jean Aberbach & Hill and Range Songs, Chicago, 2010, p. 238). In the following months, Aberbach, already legendary in the music industry for helping to build the careers of Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, Johnny Cash and many others, relentlessly pursued the rising visual artist.
Botero initially rebuffed Aberbach, telling him he had no works for sale and then eventually relenting and offering a still life, which Aberbach rejected. He wanted a family scene like the one he had seen in MOMA’s collection. Eventually, Aberbach succeeded, procuring his first work from the artist, The Widower, now in the collection of the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires.
Family scenes, one of the most important subjects in the artist’s oeuvre, first emerged on a grand scale in Botero’s paintings in the late 1950s with masterpieces like Camera degli Sposi (Homenaje a Mantegna). For the next seven decades, Botero remained preoccupied with family subjects, exploring the theme in paintings, sculptures and drawings. In The Widower, Botero presents a tragicomedy, in which a father dominates a traditionally female space, a position he awkwardly assumes due to the death of his young wife who is shown in a portrait resting on the table.
After this first acquisition, Aberbach returned repeatedly to Botero’s studio, buying one painting after another, eventually creating, together with his wife Susan, one of the most important collections of works by the artist. In The Playroom, painted two years after The Widower, Botero returned to the themes of family and fatherhood, but this time without the morose undertones of death. The father in The Playroom appears much more at ease in this traditionally female domestic space than his predecessor in The Widower. He lounges on the floor in his smart suit complete with jaunty boutonniere, peering out from his children’s playhouse, all the while smoking half a pack of cigarettes, which he blithely extinguishes on the floor. The scene appears to be one of wit and whimsy, but there is something of the surreal in it as well. Smoke somehow billows from the toy train as it makes its way around the broken track. The gigantic young boy on the floor is able to hold both a cat and mouse at the same time, and all three remain unperturbed by the flies that surround them. Above him, his even more gigantic swashbuckling brother, wears a cape that flutters behind him despite the stationary nature of his preternaturally real-looking mount. Meanwhile, his sister (or is it his mother?) holds the immobile horse in place. Behind them, their much too tiny sister opens or closes the window to her playhouse, mimicking the door left ajar in the background that leads us out of the picture plane.
This incongruous play of proportion is a hallmark of Botero’s singular style. In the best of the artist’s works, corpulent bodies squeeze into and push up against the picture plane, imbuing his figures with his now universally-recognized, signature monumentality.
Any tension created by these distortions in scale are offset by Botero’s perfect palette pitch. A consummate colorist, Botero created chromatic harmony by utilizing a limited number of colors in each canvas that evenly reverberate across the composition. The Playroom, rendered in Botero’s classic pastel hues of the 1960s and 70s, is a concerto where soft rose and a mellow yellow dominate, accompanied by muted green and soothing blue. This restrictive repeating palette creates an overall feeling of balance and calm that Botero sought to achieve in his work. “I am interested in quiet colour, not excited or feverish colour. I have always considered that great art conveys tranquility and, in that sense, I seek that even in colour.” (Fernando Botero quoted in, A. M. Escallón, "From the Inside out: An Interview with Fernando Botero" in, Botero: New Works on Canvas, New York, 1997, p. 48).
By the time Botero completed The Playroom in 1970, his relationship with Aberbach had become one of the most influential of his career. That same year, he painted Joachim Jean Aberbach and His Family, one of the few portraits the prolific artist executed. Years later, Botero would recall that he could divide his life between the time before Aberbach and the time after (B.Biszick-Lockwood, Restless Giant: The Life and Times of Jean Aberbach & Hill and Range Songs, p. 239). The music executive was instrumental in introducing the young, foreign Botero to New York’s art cognoscenti. Through Aberbach, Botero met Frank Lloyd, the owner of Marlborough Gallery, one of a small number of preeminent international galleries at the time. During its heyday in the late 1960s and 70s, Marlborough exclusively represented Botero and helped launch the artist onto an international stage. In 1973, Aberbach opened, Aberbach Fine Art, and although unable to represent Botero due to his contract with Marlborough, he would go on to sell many of the artist’s most significant works. Over the ensuing decades, as Botero gained greater international recognition, Aberbach’s counsel remained paramount to the artist, however, it was their close personal friendship that was most valued. Upon Aberbach’s death in 1992, Botero would describe his friend as not only a mentor, but a father figure, a particularly poignant avowal, given that the artist’s own father had died when he was only four.
The Playroom is fatherhood writ large and thus, it seems only fitting that this painting hung in Botero’s father figure’s home for decades. It was not necessarily Aberbach that Botero had in mind though when he painted The Playroom. In 1970, Botero was undoubtedly reflecting on his own role as a father as he welcomed his fourth child into the world. This new familial addition assuredly left him thinking of his older three children at home in Colombia as well. While not Botero’s own family portrait, The Playroom pulls from life and a faraway home; it gives fruit to one of the principle tenet’s of the artist’s work: “I want my paintings to have roots. These roots give truth to what you do. You can’t take from the air; you have to go from the ground” (Fernando Botero in I. Sischy “An Interview with Fernando Botero,” Artforum, May 1985, p. 73).
While Miller opened the door to the hallowed halls of modernism, a second encounter a few years later proved to be the turning point in Botero’s career. The wildly successful music publishing executive Jean Aberbach happened upon a group exhibition at MOMA that included Botero’s The Presidential Family, the second work by the artist to enter the museum’s collection. Aberbach would later describe his encounter with the painting as an almost transcendental experience. “[After leaving the painting], I walked back into the darkness and the rain, and my cheeks reached out for the raindrops and my heart was filled with happiness and expectation.” (Jean Aberbach in B. Biszick-Lockwood, Restless Giant: The Life and Times of Jean Aberbach & Hill and Range Songs, Chicago, 2010, p. 238). In the following months, Aberbach, already legendary in the music industry for helping to build the careers of Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, Johnny Cash and many others, relentlessly pursued the rising visual artist.
Botero initially rebuffed Aberbach, telling him he had no works for sale and then eventually relenting and offering a still life, which Aberbach rejected. He wanted a family scene like the one he had seen in MOMA’s collection. Eventually, Aberbach succeeded, procuring his first work from the artist, The Widower, now in the collection of the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires.
Family scenes, one of the most important subjects in the artist’s oeuvre, first emerged on a grand scale in Botero’s paintings in the late 1950s with masterpieces like Camera degli Sposi (Homenaje a Mantegna). For the next seven decades, Botero remained preoccupied with family subjects, exploring the theme in paintings, sculptures and drawings. In The Widower, Botero presents a tragicomedy, in which a father dominates a traditionally female space, a position he awkwardly assumes due to the death of his young wife who is shown in a portrait resting on the table.
After this first acquisition, Aberbach returned repeatedly to Botero’s studio, buying one painting after another, eventually creating, together with his wife Susan, one of the most important collections of works by the artist. In The Playroom, painted two years after The Widower, Botero returned to the themes of family and fatherhood, but this time without the morose undertones of death. The father in The Playroom appears much more at ease in this traditionally female domestic space than his predecessor in The Widower. He lounges on the floor in his smart suit complete with jaunty boutonniere, peering out from his children’s playhouse, all the while smoking half a pack of cigarettes, which he blithely extinguishes on the floor. The scene appears to be one of wit and whimsy, but there is something of the surreal in it as well. Smoke somehow billows from the toy train as it makes its way around the broken track. The gigantic young boy on the floor is able to hold both a cat and mouse at the same time, and all three remain unperturbed by the flies that surround them. Above him, his even more gigantic swashbuckling brother, wears a cape that flutters behind him despite the stationary nature of his preternaturally real-looking mount. Meanwhile, his sister (or is it his mother?) holds the immobile horse in place. Behind them, their much too tiny sister opens or closes the window to her playhouse, mimicking the door left ajar in the background that leads us out of the picture plane.
This incongruous play of proportion is a hallmark of Botero’s singular style. In the best of the artist’s works, corpulent bodies squeeze into and push up against the picture plane, imbuing his figures with his now universally-recognized, signature monumentality.
Any tension created by these distortions in scale are offset by Botero’s perfect palette pitch. A consummate colorist, Botero created chromatic harmony by utilizing a limited number of colors in each canvas that evenly reverberate across the composition. The Playroom, rendered in Botero’s classic pastel hues of the 1960s and 70s, is a concerto where soft rose and a mellow yellow dominate, accompanied by muted green and soothing blue. This restrictive repeating palette creates an overall feeling of balance and calm that Botero sought to achieve in his work. “I am interested in quiet colour, not excited or feverish colour. I have always considered that great art conveys tranquility and, in that sense, I seek that even in colour.” (Fernando Botero quoted in, A. M. Escallón, "From the Inside out: An Interview with Fernando Botero" in, Botero: New Works on Canvas, New York, 1997, p. 48).
By the time Botero completed The Playroom in 1970, his relationship with Aberbach had become one of the most influential of his career. That same year, he painted Joachim Jean Aberbach and His Family, one of the few portraits the prolific artist executed. Years later, Botero would recall that he could divide his life between the time before Aberbach and the time after (B.Biszick-Lockwood, Restless Giant: The Life and Times of Jean Aberbach & Hill and Range Songs, p. 239). The music executive was instrumental in introducing the young, foreign Botero to New York’s art cognoscenti. Through Aberbach, Botero met Frank Lloyd, the owner of Marlborough Gallery, one of a small number of preeminent international galleries at the time. During its heyday in the late 1960s and 70s, Marlborough exclusively represented Botero and helped launch the artist onto an international stage. In 1973, Aberbach opened, Aberbach Fine Art, and although unable to represent Botero due to his contract with Marlborough, he would go on to sell many of the artist’s most significant works. Over the ensuing decades, as Botero gained greater international recognition, Aberbach’s counsel remained paramount to the artist, however, it was their close personal friendship that was most valued. Upon Aberbach’s death in 1992, Botero would describe his friend as not only a mentor, but a father figure, a particularly poignant avowal, given that the artist’s own father had died when he was only four.
The Playroom is fatherhood writ large and thus, it seems only fitting that this painting hung in Botero’s father figure’s home for decades. It was not necessarily Aberbach that Botero had in mind though when he painted The Playroom. In 1970, Botero was undoubtedly reflecting on his own role as a father as he welcomed his fourth child into the world. This new familial addition assuredly left him thinking of his older three children at home in Colombia as well. While not Botero’s own family portrait, The Playroom pulls from life and a faraway home; it gives fruit to one of the principle tenet’s of the artist’s work: “I want my paintings to have roots. These roots give truth to what you do. You can’t take from the air; you have to go from the ground” (Fernando Botero in I. Sischy “An Interview with Fernando Botero,” Artforum, May 1985, p. 73).