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Artist or Maker: Fernando Botero (Colombian b. 1932)

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Provenance: R. Benedek collection, New York.
Joachim Jean Aberbach collection, Old Westbury, Long Island.
Private collection, Miami.
Acquired from the above by the present owner.

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Exhibited: Munich, Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Fernando Botero: Bilder, Zeichnungen, Skulpturen , July- September 1986. This exhibition later traveled to Bremen, Kunsthalle, January-March 1987; Frankfurt, Schirn Kunsthalle, March- May 1987; Madrid, Reina Sofía, June- August 1987.

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Notes: Fernando Botero wanted to be a matador . He began painting while a teenager, inspired by the pre-Columbian artifacts and Spanish colonial art of his hometown, Medellín, Colombia, close to the Andes. Born in 1932 to a family of modest means, Botero's father was a travelling salesman who died unexpectedly when his son was only two, leaving his wife with three boys in her care. The artist moved to Europe to study art at twenty; he earned his living in Madrid copying paintings--particularly those of Francisco de Goya and Diego Velázquez--from El Prado. He spent the rest of the decade traveling Europe, studying the art treasures housed in Paris and Florence. After visiting his first modern art museum in Bogota when he was eighteen, in 1950, the artist maintains a long-standing art historical dialogue with the major figures that he studied. Examples of his paintings relate to artworks by Uccello, Mantegna, della Francesca, Van Eyck, da Vinci, Rubens, Velázquez, Goya, Ingres, Cézanne, Picasso, and the Mexican masters, especially Rivera, among others.

In 1957, Botero painted a mandolin with a tiny central orifice. This distortion of the instrument's proportions charmed the painter by turning his subject into a giganticized, magical volume. By the time he moved to New York City, in 1960, he had matured this trademark style of rounded, oversized bodies. His commitment to figurative work (more akin to the concurrent new figuration movements in Argentina) went against the grain of popular currents in the U.S. art capital at that time, even when, initially, he used a more expressive brush. While abstract expressionism, pop art, and then minimalism dominated these years, Botero's work could only be understood in relationship to particular pop trends; for example, his work has been noted to have a kindred sensibility to that of Claes Oldenburg's, who also inflates ordinary objects to monumental scope. However, when The Museum of Modern Art, New York, acquired his work for its collection in 1967, Botero's validation as a key figure of twentieth-century art was confirmed.

Fernando Botero's work is not realistic. His fleshy, eroticized figures exist in serene netherworlds. He utilizes a vocabulary of simple, voluptuous forms that structure strong compositions. They appropriate or allude to the long history of painting; accessible yet enigmatic, his figures exist in spaces of fantasy, subtle decadence, over-ripeness. The artist plays on appearances, fascinated with the grotesque. His mordant wit is affectionate but ironic, and his works have a strong element of class-based social criticism. Drawing on old master formal portraits, his inflated figures satirize the pomp and pageantry of elite society, the self-important drama of the Catholic Church, and the small-minded meticulousness of the military and governmental bureaucracy. Other works gently challenge sexual mores. Botero references Latin American folk art through his flat, brightly exuberant color and outlined forms. He favors a smooth, even surface, devoid of brushwork. The artist has stated:

I want to paint as though I were always painting fruit. You know, Cézanne used to say to his wife when she was sitting for him, "Just sit there as though you were an apple." That's the way. And when you look at a Cézanne you don't wonder about what he was thinking at the time; you see fruit, you see a painting. ( Fernando Botero, Paintings and Drawings , edited and with an introduction by W. Spies. Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1992, 160.)

In 1973, Botero returned to Paris and began creating bronze sculptures in addition to his prolific works on canvas, which have been exhibited in large, outdoor displays in New York and Venice, among others. In the last decade, his work has shifted, as he completed monumental cycles dealing with real-world, tragic events: contemporary bloodshed and violence in Colombia caused by its rampant drug trade, and the illegal torture inflicted by American military on Iraqi detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison. Botero is one of the best-known, living Latin American artists. And, like his compatriot, Gabriel García Márquez, it is fair to say that Botero's work has remained rooted in his Colombian identity, no matter where he lives.

Sunday Afternoon is one of several Botero picnic scenes which may be thought to ruminate on the round, sun-caressed volumes found in Seurat's riverside vignettes. Bucolic paintings, the picnics depict couples or families relaxing in the countryside. Here, a well-dressed couple and their three children, one of whom watches over them dressed in a military uniform, lounge on a pink blanket cradled in a small mountainous plateau. Hemmed in by the surrounding peaks, this tiny, high arena recalls Medellín itself. The Marine-like figure of the older child watching over the family stands at attention, holding a sword and an apple. He is akin to the Christ figure in Piero della Francesca's The Resurrection , standing alertly at attention. While the apple he holds resonates with the fruit and toy balls scattered around the family--and indeed, the family group itself is arranged like a living still life--the older boy's raised sword echoes the strange thorny tree trunks crisscrossing the sky. This multiplied effect recalls the raised, bristling spears of Ucello's Battle of San Romano , Giotto's The Betrayal of Christ , and Velázquez's The Surrender at Breda . The family group is oddly sensual. The mother's voluminous hair is piled high like the alpine peaks that surround her. Like the Virgin Mary, she displays a baby on her lap, but the strangely swaddled child oozes between her plump thighs. A second, larger child in a hooded suit approaches her lap, but she stares serenely into space. Behind her, the man swelters in a suit, resting on his side as he stares dreamily into space; his mustache could be seen as an autobiographical referent. His colossal reclining body echoes the horizon and the hillocks; he sinks into and merges with nature. A smoking volcano in the far left distance sends a phallic plume from a tender pink pinnacle; across the painting's surface, a reciprocal trail of smoke curls from the father's reddened cigarette tip toward his tiny, tender lips. His sharply pendant tie points down to the picnic basket, from which two baby bottles with fleshy rubber nipples poke. The central female figure can be seen to be flanked by men at all stages of life: as babies, toddlers, in military service, and in maturity as bourgeois businessmen. Ranging in shades from light blues, ceruleans, to greys, they circle around her central, rotund figure. Created in the same year as the MoMA acquisition, this work is an early piece that stakes Botero's enduring themes.

Deborah Cullen, Director of Curatorial Programs, El Museo del Barrio.