In a sense, all great artists are well-informed
art historians. Throughout the history of Western painting, borrowings
and appropriations have been both subtle and blatant on the part
of major and minor artists from the Renaissance and beyond. Although
the notion of giving new life to older compositions has been codified
only in the twentieth century (the greatest proponent of this trend
being Picasso), earlier masters discreetly built their oeuvres upon
a repertory of visual images and themes developed by past painters.
Fernando Botero has brought the art of appropriation to new heights
in the later years of this century.
Picasso systematically mined the fields of art
historical invention, passing from El Greco - through Velázquez
and Poussin to Lucas Cranach and, finally, Courbet and Manet. Botero
casts his net even wider. We have already commented above on the
significance of his expressionist recastings, in the late 1950s
and early 1960s, of Leonardo's Mona Lisa. At virtually the same
time, Botero's glance fell upon more modern artists such as Cézanne
and, in 1963, he painted a large Madame Cézanne in the Gorden.This
work, in which the gestural brush appears to be more gentle and
controlled than formerly, is unusual in its insistence upon a dark
palette.The predominant color here is dark brown, punctuated only
by the orange hair and pink scarf of Madame Cézanne. Even the flowers
themselves, elements which usually offer the artist the opportunity
to present virtual riots of color, are monochrome and subdued.
Mantegna had captured Botero's attention while
he was still a student in Italy. The early versions, such as the
1958 Homage to Mantegna I, of the Camera degli Sposi's group portraits
of the Gonzaga family (with pride of place on the lower level going
to the cat and the female dwarf), offer us an analogous deadpan
revisiting of the somber family and their entourage; they reappeared
in Botero's oeuvre on other occasions. Italian artists of the Renaissance
and Baroque traditions have continued to nurture Botero's fantasy.
Botero's imagination was not captured by the Italian
artists alone. He also penetrated the more tempered realms of the
Northern Renaissance, Jan Van Eyck's Arnolfini Wedding in the National
Gallery, London, is a virtually "anti-Botero'' image given
its diminutive size. However, in a work of 1978, Botero gave the
participants in this marriage-consecrating picture a monumental
presence that memorializes them in a twentieth-century context.
In Peter Paul Rubens, Botero found a perfect match for his ambitions
of immensity. Rubens - artist of vast historical compositions, mythological
scenes of Hollywood-spectacle proportions, ambitious hunting parties,
and religious opuses peopled by muscular saints and voluptuous virgins
- must certainly have been a challenge for Botero, whose own visions
are of considerable volume and girth. Curiously, it was not on any
of the challenging scenographic spectacles that Botero fixed his
attention, but rather on the gracious and voluptuous women that
Rubens painted. The various versions of Mrs. Rubens of the 1960s
confront us with a charming woman in a fancy feathered hat, staring
out at her public with a demurely sensuous gaze.
Of all the Renaissance and Baroque artists who
have sparked Botero's interest, none has been as much of a magnet
for his creativity as Diego Velázquez.The greatest master of the
Spanish Golden Age,Velázquez has traditionally served as both inspiration
and challenge for artists from Spain and Latin America (and elsewhere,
of course), Botero came into first-hand contact with Velázquez's
work in Madrid, in 1952 (when he studied at the Royal Academy of
San Fernando).The Prado was naturally the place to which he gravitated,
and Velázquez and Goya soon became his most important teachers during
that period. As has occurred in the case of many artists in the
past, Velázquez's greatest achievement, the 1656 Las Meninas, was
the image that proved to be the biggest challenge to Botero.This
painting is many things, from group portrait, to the artist's self
portrait, to the investigation of the potential of reflection (with
the use of mirrors) and spacial recession. The Impressionists admired
the Spanish artist's expertise at suggesting light effects, as well
as the brilliance of his painting of both cloth and jewels, especially
in the figure of the little princess Margarita, who is the focal
point of the composition. Curiously, Botero did not pick up the
challenge of the composition as a whole. Instead, he extracted figures
from it, especially that of the Infanta, and the 1977 "After
Velázquez offers his discreet homage to this great master painting.
In the 1985 Self Portrait as Velázquez, Botero dresses himself as
the Spanish artist, playing, in a post-modern sense, with realities
and personalities as they are transformed by an exchange of dress.
Botero also connected with the humanity and compassion
of Velázquez's paintings, and deeply admired the latter's series
of portraits of the dwarfs employed by the court of King Philip
IV as both jesters and care-takers for the royal children.The tradition
of portraying court dwarfs is an old one in European art, but Velázquez
was the first to paint them with a sense of humanity and insight
into their individuality. It was this characteristic that drove
Botero to concentrate on these figures in his own series of paintings,
which includes the 1984 Mari Bárbola d'après Velázquez.
Eighteenth-century artists such as Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun
and Hyacinthe Rigaud were also examined on several occasions by
Botero, who even inserted his own self portrait into a 1973 version
of Rigaud's Louis XIV. Of the nineteenth-century traditions, Botero
has looked with intense scrutiny at Ingres. His interest in the
master of the expressive line and the champion of a decorous neo-classical
reserve is not surprising, In Botero's 1979 Mademoiselle Rivière
(No. 2) 1805, after Ingres, the sensuality of the original model
is enhanced in the Colombian artist's exalted conception of this
elegant woman. Reminiscences (if not direct appropriations) of Edouard
Manet's ground-breaking composition Luncheon on the Grass (Le Déjeuner
sur l'herbe) are also found in several paintings depicting picnics
by Botero.
Perhaps Botero's most interesting compositions
in the realm of ''art and art history" represent the interiors
of art galleries. Pictures such as The Botero Exhibition of 1975
may be read on many levels. On one hand, these gallery scenes (in
which every work on display is by Botero himself) gently satirize
the act of commercial display of works of art. In their bringing
together representations of paintings (as well as the individuals
observing them) which, in real life, are found in disparate collections.
He is reminding us of the Renaissance tradition of ''picture gallery
paintings'' as exemplified in the eighteenth century by Giovanni
Paolo Pannini. At the same time, in painting his own gallery pictures,
Botero is inserting himself within the culture of the art world
and art history, declaring his position as an artist whose work,
''en masse'', is worthy of contemplation, admiration, and acquisition.
Text from Humanist
/ Universalist |