.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Fernando Botero's Junta militar (1973) is, at first glance, a perfectly representative example of the artist's signature style. Its full figures, painted in bright, flat colors, embody an artistic mode that has become universally recognized as characteristic of the Colombian master, whose style of painting has been much imitated and copied. In this work all of the eight figures, three of them on horseback and five standing, are together in an interior room. The colonnades and the rich, red oriental carpet define this space as both official and luxurious, perhaps a presidential palace or congressional headquarters. This is only one of many instances in Botero's oeuvre in which he treats subjects drawn from the military. In one of his most famous canvases The Presidential Family he refers, for example, to the well-known characteristic of Latin American families, which states that of several sons there would usually be one who chooses the religious life, another would opt for politics and yet another would choose the military. Many of Botero's other paintings done throughout his career contain military figures as part of the larger configuration of participants. Given this thematic predilection, the Junta militar does not appear to be a particularly unusual work. However, as the viewer begins to examine it more closely, analyzing the individual details of the scene, its incongruities become more pronounced. We observe, for example, the disparity of the size of the participants, from the very large, imposing figure of the mounted general, to the much smaller figures on horseback or standing on the floor.
Yet what interests me most about this imposing painting is not what we are able to observe directly, but the messages that we are able to glean from it, as well as the fact that it foreshadows many later thematic preoccupations of Botero that come to the fore more directly as his career progresses. By looking at this picture in a somewhat sharper focus, we may be able to appreciate the Junta militar as a metaphor for the painter's constant (although often covert) political engagement. Anyone familiar with his most recent art (especially that done since 2000) will recognize this painting as containing a kernel of Botero's developing themes which, in recent examples of his visual production, have become deeply disturbing, even shocking in their effects.
The Junta militar develops from Botero's analysis of subjects related to sadness, violence, melancholy and nostalgia. Although the soldiers in this image may seem harmless in their stolid forms and overblown rigidity, at the core of this work there is a deeply sinister atmosphere. Conventional descriptons of Botero point to him as an innovative painter, draftsman and sculptor who transformed modern art in Colombia, especially in the 1960s and 70s, through his highly original deployment of sources such as Pop art and his creative re- workings of old master paintings. A more nuanced understanding of his art will take us into other realms.
One of Botero's earliest surviving works, a watercolor (seen in many of the retrospectives dedicated to the artist) depicting a crouching, crying woman, partakes of the post-World War II sensibility of anxiety. This Crying Woman is usually described as displaying a clear influence from the later phases of Mexican muralism (especially the highly expressive work of Jose Clemente Orozco) with which he was intimately familiar through reproductions, and, later, from having spent considerable time in Mexico. While this is certainly true, it is more productive to consider this and later images of anxiety as part of a transnational trend in representational painting of the 1940s and 50s which responded to the virtual dispair of the world's intellectuals following the destruction that was suffered in all quarters of the world in the 1940s. In Botero's own work, the 1960s marked a period in which scenes of violence, both collective and individual, made constant appearances. A dramatic example of this is a well known composition of 1966 entitled Dead Bishops in which we observe a virtual mountain of slain prelates, piled one atop another, presumably the victims of an anti-clerical massacre. Throughout the 60s we see in Botero's painting images of despair, warfare and mayhem. In his art of this period (which, after the early 60s and the end of his engagement with the visual effects of abstract expressionism in canvases such as Mona Lisa Age 12, took on his characteristic seemlessness, smooth application of paint and bright, flat colors) benign descriptions of Colombian rural or urban themes alternate with disturbing themes of rape, murder and mob violence - sometimes at the hands of the police or the military.
While some myopic or naive art historians and critics view Botero as an artist out of touch with either developments in the art world or the social circumstances of his time, a careful assessment of his accomplishments from the 1950s to the present reveal a different picture altogether. His significance as a catalyst for change and artistic evolution in the art of Colombia and other parts of South America, as signaled in the criticism of such a revered figure as Marta Traba, is beyond the scope of this essay (although it will be considered in a forthcoming study of mine), Nonetheless, I would like to use this bief discussion of the Junta militar to indicate something of Botero's evolving engagement with social dilemmas.
Even in genres in which one would not normally encounter intimations of violence, Botero injects his sensitivity to pain and suffering - or its potential - into his art. In a well known still life done in the 1970s depicting The Butcher's Table (Hood Art Museum, Dartmouth College), for example, depictions of scissors, knives, animals' entrails, bloody cuts of fly-infested meat signify decay and death.
The exclusive soldierly presence in Junta militar adumbrates Botero's continued interest in depictions of armed interventions in daily life in Colombia. It was painted less than a decade after the cessation of the institutionalized terror known as La violencia which rent the country apart between 1948 and 1966. At the same time, this painting, which its suggestion of absolute fealty to the ideal of military authority, calls to mind the wider dangers of the hemispheric tenor of the times. Between the later 1960s and throughout the 1970s coups d'état and military take-overs of democratically elected governments had ocurred in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile and beyond. Botero inevitably refers to this widespread military rule of law in this picture.
While the pernicious effects of right-wing militarism were felt perhaps less strongly in Colombia than elsewhere at this time, the might of military regimes is a theme that continued to exert a strong influence over the imagination of Fernando Botero. His treatment of the effects of para-military terror, increasingly experienced in Colombia from the 1970s and beyond, manifested themselves in his art in which he created images of drug-related violence of more recent times. Beginning in 1999 Botero began a series of terrifying depictions of the traumatic impact on daily life of Colombians caused by the drug oligarchy. These paintings were shown as a group to European audiences in the spring of 2003 at the Musée Aristide Maillol in Paris where they caused a critical sensation. Later, in the summer of 2005, Botero's Abu Ghraib series (dealing with the torture of Iraqui prisoners of U.S. troops in Baghdad) exhibited in Rome, set the stage for yet another chapter in the artist's investigation of human cruelty.
While the Junta militar is devoid of the type of overt images of horror that gained greater currency in Botero's art as the years passed, it nonetheless contains an important core element of what was to come in his subject matter. It is, in its deceivingly mild way, a milestone on the artist's road to uncovering the many layers of society's dehumanization, which often occurs at the hands of politicians and the military.
Edward J. Sullivan
New York, 2005
Yet what interests me most about this imposing painting is not what we are able to observe directly, but the messages that we are able to glean from it, as well as the fact that it foreshadows many later thematic preoccupations of Botero that come to the fore more directly as his career progresses. By looking at this picture in a somewhat sharper focus, we may be able to appreciate the Junta militar as a metaphor for the painter's constant (although often covert) political engagement. Anyone familiar with his most recent art (especially that done since 2000) will recognize this painting as containing a kernel of Botero's developing themes which, in recent examples of his visual production, have become deeply disturbing, even shocking in their effects.
The Junta militar develops from Botero's analysis of subjects related to sadness, violence, melancholy and nostalgia. Although the soldiers in this image may seem harmless in their stolid forms and overblown rigidity, at the core of this work there is a deeply sinister atmosphere. Conventional descriptons of Botero point to him as an innovative painter, draftsman and sculptor who transformed modern art in Colombia, especially in the 1960s and 70s, through his highly original deployment of sources such as Pop art and his creative re- workings of old master paintings. A more nuanced understanding of his art will take us into other realms.
One of Botero's earliest surviving works, a watercolor (seen in many of the retrospectives dedicated to the artist) depicting a crouching, crying woman, partakes of the post-World War II sensibility of anxiety. This Crying Woman is usually described as displaying a clear influence from the later phases of Mexican muralism (especially the highly expressive work of Jose Clemente Orozco) with which he was intimately familiar through reproductions, and, later, from having spent considerable time in Mexico. While this is certainly true, it is more productive to consider this and later images of anxiety as part of a transnational trend in representational painting of the 1940s and 50s which responded to the virtual dispair of the world's intellectuals following the destruction that was suffered in all quarters of the world in the 1940s. In Botero's own work, the 1960s marked a period in which scenes of violence, both collective and individual, made constant appearances. A dramatic example of this is a well known composition of 1966 entitled Dead Bishops in which we observe a virtual mountain of slain prelates, piled one atop another, presumably the victims of an anti-clerical massacre. Throughout the 60s we see in Botero's painting images of despair, warfare and mayhem. In his art of this period (which, after the early 60s and the end of his engagement with the visual effects of abstract expressionism in canvases such as Mona Lisa Age 12, took on his characteristic seemlessness, smooth application of paint and bright, flat colors) benign descriptions of Colombian rural or urban themes alternate with disturbing themes of rape, murder and mob violence - sometimes at the hands of the police or the military.
While some myopic or naive art historians and critics view Botero as an artist out of touch with either developments in the art world or the social circumstances of his time, a careful assessment of his accomplishments from the 1950s to the present reveal a different picture altogether. His significance as a catalyst for change and artistic evolution in the art of Colombia and other parts of South America, as signaled in the criticism of such a revered figure as Marta Traba, is beyond the scope of this essay (although it will be considered in a forthcoming study of mine), Nonetheless, I would like to use this bief discussion of the Junta militar to indicate something of Botero's evolving engagement with social dilemmas.
Even in genres in which one would not normally encounter intimations of violence, Botero injects his sensitivity to pain and suffering - or its potential - into his art. In a well known still life done in the 1970s depicting The Butcher's Table (Hood Art Museum, Dartmouth College), for example, depictions of scissors, knives, animals' entrails, bloody cuts of fly-infested meat signify decay and death.
The exclusive soldierly presence in Junta militar adumbrates Botero's continued interest in depictions of armed interventions in daily life in Colombia. It was painted less than a decade after the cessation of the institutionalized terror known as La violencia which rent the country apart between 1948 and 1966. At the same time, this painting, which its suggestion of absolute fealty to the ideal of military authority, calls to mind the wider dangers of the hemispheric tenor of the times. Between the later 1960s and throughout the 1970s coups d'état and military take-overs of democratically elected governments had ocurred in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile and beyond. Botero inevitably refers to this widespread military rule of law in this picture.
While the pernicious effects of right-wing militarism were felt perhaps less strongly in Colombia than elsewhere at this time, the might of military regimes is a theme that continued to exert a strong influence over the imagination of Fernando Botero. His treatment of the effects of para-military terror, increasingly experienced in Colombia from the 1970s and beyond, manifested themselves in his art in which he created images of drug-related violence of more recent times. Beginning in 1999 Botero began a series of terrifying depictions of the traumatic impact on daily life of Colombians caused by the drug oligarchy. These paintings were shown as a group to European audiences in the spring of 2003 at the Musée Aristide Maillol in Paris where they caused a critical sensation. Later, in the summer of 2005, Botero's Abu Ghraib series (dealing with the torture of Iraqui prisoners of U.S. troops in Baghdad) exhibited in Rome, set the stage for yet another chapter in the artist's investigation of human cruelty.
While the Junta militar is devoid of the type of overt images of horror that gained greater currency in Botero's art as the years passed, it nonetheless contains an important core element of what was to come in his subject matter. It is, in its deceivingly mild way, a milestone on the artist's road to uncovering the many layers of society's dehumanization, which often occurs at the hands of politicians and the military.
Edward J. Sullivan
New York, 2005