Fernando Botero, artist whose outsized figures enraged the critics but delighted the public – obituary

Fernando Botero, the Colombian painter, who has died aged 91, was adored by audiences and internationally but denigrated by critics. His canvases and bronze sculptures, populated by a lively array of priests and cardinals, army generals, circus folk, farmers, rich housewives, pimps and prostitutes, all represented as disproportionately plump and babyfaced, were deemed too kitsch to be taken seriously. “He has absolutely nothing to do with contemporary art,” the American critic Rosalind Krauss sniffed.

Yet his fans were legion enough to make him the highest-valued living Latin American artist, collected by institutions ranging from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the Vatican; his sculpture graced public spaces around the world, not least the Broadgate Venus (1989), a big-boned nude reclining outside Liverpool Street station in London, a scant cloth covering her loins.

The art world’s snobbery worked in his favour, Botero argued. “My popularity has to do with the divorce between modern art, where everything is obscure, and the viewer who often feels he needs a professor to tell them whether it’s good or not,” he said in 2012. “I believe a painting has to talk directly to the viewer, with composition, colour and design.”

Fernando Botero Angulo was born on April 19 1932 in Medellín to David Botero, a salesman who travelled from town to town on horseback, and Flora Angulo, who sought work as a seamstress on David’s death when Fernando was aged four.

The boy attended matador school but turned to art aged 16, becoming an illustrator for the Sunday literary supplement of El Colombiano, Medellín’s leading newspaper. “In my town there were no museums, no galleries, no information about art whatsoever. We had a painting of the Virgin Mary in the living room. That was it.”

The principal of Escola Bolivariano, the Jesuit school he joined in 1944, was unimpressed by the nudes El Colombiano featured, the final straw coming when Botero wrote an article praising Picasso, and in 1949 the boy was expelled.

Undeterred, he moved to Bogotá and had his first exhibition at Galerias de Arte Foto-Estudio Leo Matiz, selling all 25 of the oils, watercolours and drawings. He used the money to move again, this time to Tolú, on Colombia’s Caribbean coast.

While Botero argued that art should be “an oasis created for man to take refuge from harsh reality”, he made intermittent forays into politics. Front of the Sea (1952) was the first of these, featuring a man trussed up to a pole, a scene denouncing “La Violencia”, the 10-year civil war raging in Colombia at the time.

Later, Botero would turn his attention to the Latin American dictatorships of the 1970s, painting the puffed-up military men, who oversaw human-rights abuses across the continent, alongside their bloated fur coat-clad wives. 

His most shocking foray into politics, which won him a partial reprieve from even his fiercest critical detractors, came in 2007 when he produced 87 drawings and paintings representing the torture of Iraqi prisoners by US military at the Abu Ghraib prison. “It is not possible for art to resolve situations which are basically political,” he maintained. “The artist shows the situation that exists like a permanent denunciation.”

In 1952 he sailed to Spain, where he enrolled at Academia San Fernando in Madrid for two terms. He left disillusioned by the teaching, and instead toured Europe for four years, exposing himself to Classical and Renaissance art.

He recalled seeing Piero della Francesca’s Meeting of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, a 15th-century painting full of drama and humanity, the people sharing the same smooth features that Botero would make his own. “It was as if someone had finally shown me the definition of what painting was all about,” he said of this Damascene moment. “Everything was there – the most fantastic colour – it was the most beautiful spiritual expression of a group I had ever seen.”

With Colombia still convulsed in conflict, in 1956 Botero went with his new wife, Gloria Zea, to Mexico City, where he started to play with the scale and volume of his characters. He won the Salón de Artistas Colombianos in 1958, and represented Colombia at the São Paulo Bienal in 1959.

In 1957 he showed in the US for the first time, at the Pan American Union in Washington, anticipating a more permanent move to New York in 1960. He described the decision as “masochistic” given the domination of abstract painting. In 1961, however, a curator from the Museum of Modern Art appreciated his work, Mona Lisa, Age 12, a rendition of da Vinci’s model as a child, and bought it for the collection.

Having first experimented with wood and plaster sculpture, when Botero finally settled in Paris in 1973, he started to work in bronze. It was a lucrative decision. Man on a Horse (1999), a subject which the artist returned to frequently, portraying not a great man of history, but a hawker like his father, set an auction record for the artist, selling for $4.3 million in March last year.

Botero remained in Europe until his death, partly for safety: in 1995 Farc terrorists detonated a bomb under The Bird, a bronze public sculpture by the artist in Medellín, killing 20. It was intended as a sign to his son, Fernando Botero Zea, then Colombia’s minister of defence. But in 2000 the Museo Botero opened in Bogotá, home to a collection of 125 works the artist donated to establish the institution.

Fernando Botero is survived by a daughter and two sons from his marriage to Gloria Zea, which ended in divorce in 1960. His second wife, the Greek sculptor Sophia Vari, died in May this year, and he is also predeceased by Pedro, a son from a relationship with Cecilia Zambrano who was killed in 1979 in a car accident in which Botero was injured.

Fernando Botero, born April 19 1932, died September 15 2023