The Painting of Fernando Botero: Universality and National Identity

Abstract

The outstanding contemporary artist Fernando Botero Angulo (b. 1932) is one of the leading artists of the postmodern era, thanks to the paraphrasing and irony of his works. He is also known as a graphic artist and a sculptor. Botero’s graphic and pictorial works are kept in many museums around the world, including the Russian ones — the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg and the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow; his sculptures adorn the cities of Europe, America, Asia. This article focuses on the artist’s painting: it gives an idea of him as a master who reflected universality and at the same time national identity of his country through landscape, still life, bullfighting, dancing. Several parts of the article are devoted to: «Biography and “circular form”», «Secular and religious images», «Landscape, interior, still life», «Bullfighting, music, dancing». A significant place is given to the «circular form», since it made the artist a unique creator, who used it in many great works of art, and then created images recognizable by everyone who has ever seen Botero’s paintings. There are various genres of the master’s works, in which he acts not only as a creator of a unique form, but also as a brilliant colorist. Botero managed to raise Latin America to a high pedestal; starting from the pan-European tradition, he showed the universal through his native Colombia.