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Lot Essay
Botero has long worked within the venerable canons of art history, with what he has called a “very strange mixture of admiration and criticism.” Acknowledging that “an artist is always a critic of earlier artists,” he explains, “You think you must, and can, improve on earlier ages,” but at the same time “you must have this critical attitude to art of the past... You can take the same subject and create a totally different painting. That’s where real originality lies, in taking something that’s already been done by someone and doing it differently” (in W. Spies, “‘I’m the most Colombian of Colombian artists’: A Conversation with Fernando Botero,” Fernando Botero: Paintings and Drawings, 1992, pp. 155-56). Since his first departure for Europe in 1952, Botero has drawn from (and critically reinterpreted) myriad art-historical sources—Titian and Velázquez; Giotto and Masaccio; Rubens and Ingres—and embraced the classical sensuality of volume, space, and color in legions of stylized “Boteromorphs.” In the present Cazador, Botero revisits an early and enduring source—Diego Velázquez—in a delightful meditation on the genre of hunting scenes and the art of homage.
“In the Madrid of those days it was possible to live at an inexpensive pension across from the Prado,” notes the historian and writer Germán Arciniegas. “Expenses could be cut down further by making copies of Titian and Velázquez. [Botero’s] most profitable friendship turned out to be with a man who knew all the tricks: the friend who copied Velázquez’s The Topers. The museum rules did not permit more than one copyist per room, and the time allotted each was twenty days. And he traded his right to the room with the inexperienced. Thus Botero was able to copy…” (Fernando Botero, 1977, pp. 26-7). Among the Velázquez paintings that Botero would have seen (and copied) at the Prado is Felipe IV, Cazador (1632-34), a dignified portrait of the “Planet King” in the countryside amid the Thirty Years’ War, whose conclusion in 1648 would see the balance of European power shift from Spain to France. If scenes of the hunt were generally understood as metaphors for war, Botero’s Cazador belies the imperial bellicosity of the original: in place of the Baroque king is a modern-day Latin American footsoldier, red bandana tied around his neck and bandolier wrapped around his (outsized) waist. Botero retains the essential iconography of the Velázquez—towering tree in the foreground, loyal canine companion, hilly landscape in the distance—but he renders his scene with (postcolonial) playfulness and humor, preferring an artful riposte to the seventeenth-century Spanish master.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
“In the Madrid of those days it was possible to live at an inexpensive pension across from the Prado,” notes the historian and writer Germán Arciniegas. “Expenses could be cut down further by making copies of Titian and Velázquez. [Botero’s] most profitable friendship turned out to be with a man who knew all the tricks: the friend who copied Velázquez’s The Topers. The museum rules did not permit more than one copyist per room, and the time allotted each was twenty days. And he traded his right to the room with the inexperienced. Thus Botero was able to copy…” (Fernando Botero, 1977, pp. 26-7). Among the Velázquez paintings that Botero would have seen (and copied) at the Prado is Felipe IV, Cazador (1632-34), a dignified portrait of the “Planet King” in the countryside amid the Thirty Years’ War, whose conclusion in 1648 would see the balance of European power shift from Spain to France. If scenes of the hunt were generally understood as metaphors for war, Botero’s Cazador belies the imperial bellicosity of the original: in place of the Baroque king is a modern-day Latin American footsoldier, red bandana tied around his neck and bandolier wrapped around his (outsized) waist. Botero retains the essential iconography of the Velázquez—towering tree in the foreground, loyal canine companion, hilly landscape in the distance—but he renders his scene with (postcolonial) playfulness and humor, preferring an artful riposte to the seventeenth-century Spanish master.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park