Fernando Botero

© Fernando Botero. Photo courtesy Marlborough Gallery, New York

Fernando Botero, "Abu Ghraib 31" (2005)

© Fernando Botero. Photo courtesy Marlborough Gallery, New York

Fernando Botero, "Abu Ghraib 43" (triptych) (2005)

Fernando Botero Fernando Botero: Abu Ghraib Colombian Artist Fernando Botero Under Tax Investigation in Italy [Husbands and] Wives Fernando Botero's Abu Ghraib Art Claims Spot in Nation's Capital American Fare History Repeating? The Week That Was (April 11 – 18, 2008)

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His brightly colored and generally good-natured paintings of absurdly corpulent human beings are seen as repetitive and illustrational by his detractors—but regarded by his many admirers as having a universality of vision and a profound insight into the human condition.

Though Botero has made socially engaged pictures before—particularly on the subject of violence in Colombia—news that he has produced a major series of paintings about the torture of prisoners by U.S. serviceman at Abu Ghraib prison caught many people off guard.

These much-buzzed-about paintings, and accompanying drawings, already widely exhibited in Europe, will be shown for the first time in the U.S. at the Marlborough Gallery's 57th Street location in New York from today through Nov. 18.

Fernando, can I ask why you decided to make these pictures of Abu Ghraib?

What happened in Abu Ghraib was a tremendous shock to the whole world. I believe that I have special responsibilities as an artist, and I wanted to say something about it. The artist has the ability to make invisible things visible.

Like everyone else, I was very shocked to know that the Americans were doing the same things that Saddam Hussein had done. Especially now that we know that it wasn’t just a few rotten apples. It was more than that. This is the sort of thing you expect of the developing countries in Africa or Asia or even Latin America; you don’t expect this from the United States.

And how do you imagine an American audience will respond to these pictures?

People will understand what happened from an artistic point of view. America and the world knows what happened in Abu Ghraib, but I felt it was important to have the testimony of an artist who could show things without exaggeration.

Do you think that these pictures will be more effective because they’ve been painted by an artist such as yourself, who is usually associated with rather lighter-weight subject matter?

The fact that I’ve done painting with pleasant subject matter doesn’t make it impossible for me to do work on a subject that touched me very much. Fortunately, I’m a figurative artist, and I can speak directly. I didn’t change my style at all. I painted in exactly the same way. I don’t believe you have one style for dramatic things and another for pleasant things. It’s the same style—the same forms, the same treatment of color and composition, the whole thing. The subject matter is the only thing that is different.

I’m intrigued that you’ve shown these Abu Ghraib works extensively in European museums—and now that you are showing them in the United States, it’s in a commercial gallery. Did you meet resistance from American museums?

They have been shown at the Palazzo Venezia in Rome, they have been shown at the Würth Museum in Germany, and they have been shown at the Pinacoteca in Athens. They will also be shown in museums in Milan and Valencia. But in America, although the exhibition was proposed to several museums, there was no response, and nobody wanted to do it.

How have they been received by European audiences?

The response has been shock. Because it’s one thing to see them in reproduction, but when you see the actual paintings, they are very large—some of the triptychs are almost four meters across. And it’s a large series: There are about 25 large paintings and 20 smaller ones. But we’ll not be showing everything in New York because there is not the space.

I understand that you don’t intend to sell these paintings?

They are going to be donated to a museum eventually, I don’t know where. I’m not new to the principle of donating. I donated 200 of my paintings to Colombia, and I donated a whole series of paintings based upon the war in Colombia to the National Museum there. But I will donate these because I don’t feel like doing business based upon somebody else’s pain. That’s not my thing.