© Fernando Botero, courtesy Marlborough Gallery , New York , NY
Abu Ghraib 65 (2005 Oil on canvas 13 x 19”.)
Fernando Botero: Abu Ghraib
By Jerry Tallmer
The more he thought about it, the angrier he got. “Angry and upset,” says Fernando Botero. “The exact date I don’t remember. Early 2004 I guess. Then one day on a plane I started to make drawings. And then in my studio in Paris, kept making drawings and paintings — for something like a year and a half, until there were, all told, 80 of them, paintings and drawings.”
Somewhere around 45 of those works are on exhibit through November 19 at the Marlborough Gallery on West 57th Street in this city. They’ve already been seen at big museums in Rome, Athens, and Germany. Colombian-born onetime Greenwich Villager Fernando Botero says: “No museum in the United States will show them.” Over the phone from Pietrasanta, Italy, where he spends his summers, you can feel his smile as he says: “Maybe they all have Republicans on their boards of directors, I don’t know.”
Here is one of those paintings:
Behind bars, a naked person, a male with his back to us, his hands raised defensively to ward off something unseen, sits on another naked person, also male, who lies on the prison floor on his left side, his hands tied behind his back, a boot stamping down on his blindfolded face, à la George Orwell’s image of fascism, a stream of urine cascading onto his lower body from somewhere just outside the picture. Oil on canvas, 52 5/8 x 59 1/2 inches. Title: Abu Ghraib 59.
Here’s another: Three large loosely leashed dogs with bared teeth closing in on a naked, blindfolded, bloodied male, his arms tied behind his back. This time the bars are just behind the prisoner.
One more: Behind bars, a writhing pyramid of four or five naked males clumped together above, below, and tightly around a Samson-like figure in the middle of the heap. They, too, are blindfolded and bound at wrists and ankles,
All these people are somewhat beefier than your ordinary average human male, and surely somewhat heavier than almost any “detainee” in the Abu Ghraib military prison in Iraq or the cages in Guantánamo Bay, but the balloon-like avordupois is what makes these images Boteros, n’est çe-pas?
“Oh sure,” says the 74-year-old Botero, over that phone from Tuscany. “You can have only one style to everything. Still the same artist and same style.”
In this case, that excess of human flesh — Botero’s surreal translation – only heightens the bizarre horror that are the actual Abu Ghraib, the actual Guantánamo. So, too, do the burning lines of Francisco Goya’s “Los Desastros de la Guerra,” of Picasso’s “Guernica,” of George Grosz’s blood-spattered “After the Interrogation” (by Nazi stormtroopers) — all surely having fed Botero’s juices – heighten the horror of earlier vast brutalities against human flesh and human spirit.
What had triggered Botero’s anger was, to begin with, Seymour M. Hersh’s long, unsparing “Torture at Abu Ghraib” article in the May 10, 2004, issue of The New Yorker. “And then I read more, in The New York Times, and Time magazine, and on the Internet, and I get more and more angry. I invented nothing. I was very careful to invent nothing.”
He didn’t show the results of this anger to anybody – “not really” – until “a friend who has a little magazine in Bogota asked me what I’d been doing lately.” The friend was German Santamaria, the little magazine is called Diner. “I send him some photos, and he put them in his magazine. Then some of those photos appeared on the front pages of the main newspapers in Colombia – and then there came to my studio in Paris people from all over the world, China, Russia, everywhere.”
Botero himself has been a great many places in this world but never, as it happens, to Iraq. Born April 19, 1932, in Medellin, Colombia, a city of churches, he moved to Bogota in his teens and very well remembers the violence that swept that city, and that country, on the heels of the April 9, 1948, assassination of Jorge Gaitan – “the leader of the poor people in Bogota.”
It came at the same instant as a meeting there of the 9th Pan-American Conference as well as a Latin American Youth Congress organized by the young Fidel Castro. To this day there are those who believe that Gaitan’s assassination was provoked by (a) the Communists, (b) the CIA, (c) somebody else. But in any event, says the Botero of today, “there were thousands killed, the city in flames, I was 15, I was in the streets, I saw them killing, saw the flames, saw everything.” And years later, in the 1990s, would put his hand to a notable series of paintings born out of that bloodshed and that pain.
Having gone to Europe to study Goya and Velasquez at the Prado in Madrid, to Florence to study the frescoes, to Mexico in the mid-1950s to study the murals of Rivera and Orozco, in 1960 Fernando Botero came to the United States. .
“For 14 years – 1960 to 1974 – I lived fulltime in America. Where? Well, I started on the Lower East Side, and then little by little got better places. My first studio was at 10 MacDougal Street, corner of 3rd Street, right below Washington Square. That building burned down. Then I went to Tompkins Square, and then to 14th Street and Seventh Avenue. That’s why I’m glad these things now [on Abu Ghraib] are being shown in New York.”
He’s been with the Marlborough Gallery since a group show in 1969, a one-man show in 1971. All Manhatannites must well remember the 14 robust Botero sculptures that lined the center islands of Park Avenue from 54th to 61st Streets in the fall of 1993.
Is he, by the way, thinking of turning his Abu Ghraib portfolio into some sculpture?
“No. I cannot see it as sculpture. The backgrounds in these things, for instance – the grills [prison bars]. You cannot do that as sculpture.”
Nor is any of the Abu Ghraib stuff for sale.
“I do not want to make money out of human suffering. Eventually they’ll be given to some institution, just as one hundred [of his pictures of Colombian violence, including drug violence] have gone to the national museum in Bogota, and are now on loan to Buenos Aires.”
The first museums to welcome his Abu Ghraib works were the Palazzo Venezia in Rome (as part of a 2005 Botero retrospective there); the Wurth Museum in Kunzelsau, Germany; and the Pinacoteca in Athens. Other Boteros are in the permanent collections of 46 museums around the world.
These days Fernando Botero summers in Italy – “and do the casting of my sculptures here” – and winters in Paris and New York. Has a pièd-à-terre on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Has three grown children and seven grandchildren. “My wife? I have had several,” he says jovially via phone. “But now for the last 30 years I have just one wife, Sofia, and it looks like she’s it.”
I wanted to ask him what he weighed, but I didn’t have the guts. All art is deformation, says Fernando Botero, and he should know.
FERNANDO BOTERO: ABU GHRAIB. October 18-November 18, 2006. Marlborough Gallery, 40 West 57th Street, New York, N.Y. 10019, (212) 541-4900. Open Monday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Admission free.
