LONDON—Today the Financial Times has Tobias Grey's interview with Fernando Botero, who is 16 oil paintings and 40 drawings into an ongoing series on the torture that took place at the Abu Ghraib prison.

After condemning the tortures as "perverse" for being "not only physical but psychological," Botero tells Grey among other things that his series was influenced by reading Seymour Hersh's revelations about Abu Ghraib in the New Yorker magazine last year, and, of course, by seeing the photographs.

"The artistic possibilities, leaving aside the anger one feels about what happened, were great because of the absurdity of the situation," he said.

He added: "When you see bodies piled up into a pyramid there is a plasticity there. It sounds terrible but it's the truth. There's a fresco by Giotto called The Massacre of the Innocents, in which you see a pile of dead children. When I saw the photo of these prisoners in Abu Ghraib stacked one on top of the other it made me think of Giotto. It's unbelievable but in this horror one could find artistic beauty."

FOR FULL STORY CLICK:
The Financial Times: "Bearing witness with canvas and brush"
AP Photo/Francois Mori