Marlborough Gallery

Fernando Botero

Drawings and Watercolors on Canvas

Drawings on Canvas

La Corrida: the Bullfight Paintings

Marc Fumaroli

Fernando Botero has never been in fashion in academic/art critic circles because his work is too accessible, too easy to like. Almost all of his work has a cartoonish quality that is disarming, often humorous, and easily accessible to people unschooled in the arcane art theories of the moment. Indeed, who wants critics and theoreticians around to distract one from the sheer enjoyment of what Botero has to offer? And enjoyment is what this book is about. Botero's drawings are charming in both their subject matter and their execution, and this book shows them off superbly. Mixtures of watercolor, pencil, charcoal, or pastel, on paper or often on raw canvas, their techniques are varied and interesting. Admittedly their quality is somewhat variable, but at their best they are wry, eloquent, and riveting.

Drawings

Botero

Paintings; October 23-November 23, 1996

The Bullfight Paintings, April 25-May 25, 1985, Marlborough Gallery Inc

Fernando Botero, La Corrida

Edward J. Sullivan

The drawings and watercolors handsomely illustrated in this volume provide a comprehensive overview of Fernando Botero's work in this media, which has seldom been reproduced. An introductory essay by Prof. Edward J. Sullivan of New York University, and biographical notes complete the catalogue and provide a framework for these superb but less well-known works by Botero. With consummate technical ability, this important twentieth century artist has revived the use of ancient materials: sanguine, charcoal, sepia pencil, wash and ink. Most of his drawings are executed on paper, sometimes on canvas, with great attention paid to the quality of the support. Botero uses a variety of drawing techniques. Some pieces are preparatory drawings for entire compositions - usually quick sketches of a drawing or sculpture - but the majority are independent works of art that rarely, if ever, repeat a composition the artist has executed in oils. Botero draws with affection. Each stroke of the pen or brush is applied with the knowledge that it will create another small but important part of the rich world populated by sensuous figures that has evolved throughout the years in the imagination of the artist. These drawings compel us to confront Botero's art and personality even more directly than in his paintings. In examining them with care, we are privileged to receive a glimpse into the creative mind and fertile imagination of this master. Looking at his drawings we can almost follow the genesis of the artist's ideas. It is as if we were seated at his side in intimate dialogue with him, watching his hand create the simulacra of his inner imagination.

Drawings and Watercolors

David Elliott

John Sillevis

Colombian-born Fernando Botero (b. 1932) is a painter, sculptor, and draftsman renowned for his extravagantly rounded figures combining the polish and excess of Spanish colonial baroque with the social realism of the Mexican muralists. Their humorous exaggeration belies the more serious content of Botero’s work—commentary on colonialism, political instability in Latin America, and the vernacular artistic traditions of the region, as well as European art history. Accompanying the artist’s first American retrospective in over thirty years, The Baroque World of Fernando Botero is the most extensive study of his life and work to date. Drawn exclusively from Botero’s private collection, the 100 works featured in this book, including previously unpublished paintings and drawings, represent the full scope of his oeuvre from a uniquely personal perspective. Many of these—portraits of friends and family members and remembered scenes—have remained in the artist’s possession since their creation, while others he has bought back over the years as markers of significant developments in his career. Three essays examine the artist’s creative life, from the aesthetic environment in which Botero developed his unique style to his catalyzing influence on the Colombian art world of the 1960s and 70s.

The Baroque World of Fernando Botero

Matt Frank

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