November 13, 2007
Colombia’s Botero tells why he felt moved to paint Abu Ghraib
Fernando Botero greets art fans at AU. (Photo by Jamie Hardin)
An appreciative audience packed the Katzen Arts Center for a conversation with renowned artist Fernando Botero, whose images of Abu Ghraib opened last week at the AU Museum.
The Colombian artist has long been famed for his paintings of corpulent people whose bloated proportions seem nearly sculptural. Some viewers find a cozy, cheery quality in his brightly colored and balloon-like subjects. Others see a satirical critique of bourgeois society and its inflated self-importance, rooted in Botero’s own Latin American experience.
But by any measure, the paintings displayed at AU, called “masterpieces” by the Nation and “astonishing” by the Washington Post, are quite a bit different from the popular painter’s usual work. What prompted him to create them?
“It was something I felt I had to do. It was something I hoped would be seen beyond my death, and be a reminder of a situation that was not acceptable,” Botero said in the conversation, which was moderated by School of International Service dean Louis Goodman.
Reading about the Abu Ghraib scandal, Botero was distressed by the realization that the United States, a country he admires for its political and creative freedoms, could be implicated in torture, he said.
Asked why he felt moved to paint torture in Abu Ghraib rather than torture in other places, such as the Sudan or Latin America or Saddam’s Iraq, he said that it was the discordance between American ideals and the event itself that filled him with “frustration and rage.” He had responded artistically to political abuses in his native Colombia before, but this was qualitatively different. He resolved his feelings, he said, through paint.
He was not under any illusion that his work would change the world, he said. But art can remind people of what is important, and can linger as a reminder of events and emotions long after the people who experienced them are gone.
The message of Botero’s work, Goodman said, goes beyond this specific event and raises questions about the sort of role that America should play in the world, and what sort of policies it should pursue. “I think you’re inspiring all of us to think more broadly and keep these ideas in our head even 20 years from now, the way we do with Picasso’s Guernica,” Goodman said.
One audience member admitted she didn’t initially want to look at the photographs from Abu Ghraib. She thanked him for reminding her that people should not turn away from human rights abuses just because it makes them uncomfortable.
“This was a shock to the whole world,” Botero said.
In the works, Botero uses the volumetric physicality of his trademark style to place the viewer in an intimate relationship with the victims of abuse. Yet he did not paint as part of a political agenda, he told the audience. Nor did he think about how the paintings might be received. “This fight is within yourself. You don’t think about anybody else . . . you paint for yourself,” he said.
Critics have noted his use of Christian iconography in the Abu Ghraib paintings, but this wasn’t entirely conscious, he said. The iconography of art history can come into a painting without the artist’s full realization, because the artist has been shaped by hundreds of years of history, he said.
What’s surprising, he said, is that no American painter has made art about Abu Ghraib, at least as far as he knows. Nor has Iraq prompted the kind of artistic outpouring that resulted from Vietnam, he said. That may be part of the reason for the amount of buzz the paintings have generated in the art world and popular press alike.
At any rate, he said, “I am pleased they are showing in the nation’s capital, because these paintings were made to be seen.”
Botero’s series of 79 paintings, Fernando Botero: Abu Ghraib, runs through Dec. 30 and is being shown as part of three concurrent exhibitions, ART of CONFRONTation, which also includes Claiming Space: Some American Feminist Originators, and Dark Metropolis: Irving Norman’s Social Surrealism, both run through Jan. 27.
