1932
Fernando Botero (full name Fernando Botero Angulo) was born on 19 April 1932 in the city of Medellin, the capital of the Department of Antioquia, Colombia. His parents were David Botero Mejia (1895-1936), a traveling salesman, and Flora Angulo Jaramillo (1898-1972). Both parents were born in a village in the Andes. He had two brothers: Juan David, born in 1928, and Rodrigo, born in 1936.
1936
His father died from a sudden heart attack when Botero was four years old.
1938
Fernando went to the Ateneo Antioqueno Elementary School and then to the secondary school in Medellin, where he studied for the baccalaureate.
1944
He spent most of his time drawing scenes of the traditional Fiesta Brava celebrations, especially the bullfights. His first known watercolour dates from 1944.
1948
His first exhibition with other painters was in a collective called Antioquia Painters in Bogota and he did illustrations for the Sunday supplement of Medellin’s leading newspaper, El Colombiano.
1949
Botero was affected from a very young age by the rich Colonial Baroque ornamentation that he saw in the churches and monasteries of Medellin and the surrounding areas. At the same time, he wanted to learn about modern European art, which was scarcely known in Colombia at the time. He wrote an essay about Surrealism and Salvador Dali, and called it Anatornia de la Locura (Anatomy of Madness). In it he emphasized the artistic renewal that this movement brought about. Some of his drawings reveal the influence of Mexican painters Jose Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros; for example, his watercolour Mujer Llorando (Woman Weeping) is clearly influenced by Orozco.
1950
He earned enough from his painted sketches to pay for his education and graduate from high school. Then he worked for two months as a set designer and painter for the Lope de Vega theatre company, a Spanish troupe that was touring in Colombia.
1952
Botero moved to Bogota and soon had two solo exhibitions at the Leo Matiz Gallery. In the first, he showed twenty-five watercolours, gouaches, drawings, and oils, which sold well. With the money he had earned, and encouraged by this first success, he decided to go and see Tolu, a seaport in northwest Colombia. There he painted what was to constitute his second exhibition, comprising works executed during his stay on the Caribbean coast and on the islands in the Gulf of Morrosquillo. These paintings show the influence of Gauguin and Picasso. After Botero was awarded second prize at the 9th Annual Salon of Colombian Artists in Bogota for his picture Frente al Mar (Facing the Sea), he decided to use the money he had earned to travel to Europe, so he booked a third-class ticket on a ship bound for Barcelona. After a short stay in the Catalan metropolis, he went to Madrid, enrolling as a student at the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts. In the nearby Prado Museum, he was able to study the painting of great masters such as Velazquez, Goya, Titian and Tintoretto, artists who became a vital source of inspiration for him. After one year in Madrid, he moved to Paris and stayed there for a few months. He soon realized that modern art held no attraction for him. The French avant-garde, which he had admired so much when he was in Colombia and which he could now view and judge first-hand at the Paris Museum of Modern Art, was a disappointment to him. Instead, he preferred to spend most of his time studying the old masters at the Louvre.
1953-1954
His grand tour of Europe took him to Florence, where he set up a studio and stayed two years. He was fascinated by the works of the Italian Renaissance, especially the paintings and frescos of Paolo Uccello, Masaccio, Andrea del Castagno and Piero della Francesca at Arezzo. He also visited Siena, Venice, Ravenna and other famous centres of artistic creativity. Botero spent eighteen months studying fresco techniques and 15th-century art history. At night, after his classes, he worked on paintings in oil in his studio on the Via Panicale, which had once belonged to the painter Giovanni Fattori. A characteristic painting from this period is Los Caballos (The Horses), which was inspired by Paolo Uccello and the metaphysical ambience of Giorgio de Chirico.
1955
In March, he returned to Bogota and held an exhibition in the National Library, a collection which showed the clear influence of Italian Renaissance painting. The twenty new works were a complete failure with the public, and even the critics were so influenced by French avant-garde tendencies that they reacted adversely. Botero began to work as an illustrator far various periodicals. In December, he married Gloria Zea.
1956
At the beginning of the year the couple moved to Mexico City, where their first child, Fernando, was born. There, too, he met his first dealer, Antonio Souza. While sketching a mandolin and its sound hole, Botero suddenly noticed how altering their relative proportions could enhance the impression of monumentality and volume. This discovery accorded with his many years of experimentation with plasticity, and would be the seed of his distinctive style, in which sensuality and beauty are created through exalted volumes. He took part in a group show at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts in Texas.
1957
In April, Botero had his first solo exhibition in the United States at the Pan-American Union in Washington. There he met Tania Gres, who would later open a gallery in Washington. He also visited several museums in New York and discovered Abstract Expressionism. He returned to Bogota in May, and in October he was awarded second prize at the Annual Salon of Colombian Artists for his painting Contrapunto (Counterpoint). He then exhibited at the Antonio de Souza Gallery in Mexico City.
1958
His daughter Lina was born. Botero now aged twenty-seven, was appointed to a teaching position at the Academy of Fine Arts of the National University of Colombia, where he continued as professor of painting until 1960. His reputation as one of the youngest Colombian painters was consolidated. He was commissioned to do the illustrations for Gabriel-Marquez’s story Tuesday Siesta, when it was published in the newspaper El Tiempo. He painted the large oil La Alcoba Nupcial: Homenaje a Mantegna (The Wedding Alcove: a Homage to Mantegna), a free interpretation of Mantegna’s frescos in the Ducal palace at Mantua, for which he was awarded first prize at the Annual Salon of Colombian Artists. The jury had initially rejected the work, and were persuaded to reverse their decision by influential figures from the arts and the press. The painting was later exhibited along with Obispo Dormido (Sleeping Bishop) in the exhibition Fernando Botero: Recent Oils, Watercolours, Drawings at the Gres Gallery in Washington. Most of his paintings were sold the evening the exhibition opened. He also exhibited in a group show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, while some of his works appeared in the 29th Venice Biennale. He exhibited again at the Antonia de Souza Gallery in Mexico City.
1959
At the Colombian Salon that year, Botero presented his Apoteosis de Ramon Hoyos (Apotheosis of Ramon Hoyos), which is inspired by the Colombian cycling champion. The same year, he finished the Velazquez-inspired Nino de Vallecas, of which he had produced ten previous versions. A monochrome work, its impulsive brushstrokes show that Botero was still subject to the influence of Abstract Expressionism. He represented Colombia at the 5th Sao Paulo Biennial in Brazil, along with Enrique Grau, Alejandro Obregon and Eduardo Ramirez Villamizar.
1960
From February to April he was busy painting a large fresco in the Central Mortgage Bank in Medellin. His second son, Juan Carlos, was born in Bogota. He was chosen to represent Colombia at the 2nd Inter-American Biennial in Mexico City. This decision, taken by art critic Marta Traba and other jury members, set off a series of protests that were in turn answered by counter-protests from Botero and a group of his friends. Botero exhibited for a second time at the Gres Gallery, one of his principal supporters. Unfortunately, this gallery closed soon afterwards. At the Gres exhibition, many of his followers were perplexed by the Nino de Vallecas series because it lacked the colour of his earlier work. Divorced from his first wife, Gloria Zea, he departed Colombia for the third time and headed for New York, where he rented an apartment in the Greenwich Village. There he produced a series of paintings depicting the violent crimes of Nepomuceno Matallana, a serial killer who had become part of Bogota folklore.
1961
In June, paintings and a dozen illustrations for Jorge Zalamea’s El Gran Burundun-Burunda Ha Muerto (The Great Burundun-Burunda Is Dead) were displayed at the El Callejon Gallery, Bogota. At the behest of Dorothy C. Miller, curator of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the MoMA purchased the first version of his Mona Lisa a los Doch Anos (Mona Lisa at Twelve). It was the only figurative work acquired by the Museum that year. In the introduction to the catalogue of acquisitions, Alfred H. Barr wrote “Nobody can contemplate this disturbing work without taking a position for or against.”
1962
Botero exhibited at The Contemporaries his first show in a New York gallery: it was harshly criticized.
1963
At the same time as the Metropolitan Museum in New York was showing the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci, the MoMA exhibited Botero’s Mona Lisa at Twelve. He moved his studio to the Lower East side.
1964
Botero married Cecilia Zambrano. His painting Manzanas (Apples) won second
prize in the Intercol Salon of Young Artists at the Bogota Modern Art Museum. He built a summer house on Long Island and rented a new studio on 14th Street in New York.
1965
His fully mature visual style emerged for the first time in the painting La Familia Pinzon (The Pinzon Family). He made four works based on a Rubens portrait of Helene Fourment. His compact tones, painted with precise, elegant brushstrokes, gave way to more delicate colours. Concerning his choice of subjects, Botero explained: “Although I have painted many human figures, I don’t work directly with models because they make me feel limited, they deprive me of my freedom. I prefer to paint freely and follow my own imagination.”
1966
The Staatliche Kunsthalle of Baden-Baden, Germany, organized the first Botero exhibition in Europe. Subsequently, in September, the Buchholz Gallery in Munich and the Brusberg Gallery in Hanover held showings of his work. The Milwaukee Art Center in Wisconsin held the first Botero exhibition in a United States museum. The review in ‘The Times’ was very favorable.
1967-1968
During these years Botero spent time in Colombia, New York, and Europe. On one of his visits to Germany, he went to Munich and Nuremberg and was entranced by the work of Dürer. This led to his Dureroboteros, a series of large charcoal-on-canvas pastiches of pictures by the German master.
1969
Botero showed a collection of paintings and charcoals at the Center for Inter-American Relations in New York. This exhibition consolidated his position among the most important Latin American artists. He held his first show in Paris, at the prestigious Claude Bernard Gallery.
1970
In March, a major traveling exhibition of eighty paintings opened at the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Baden-Baden, then moved to the Haus am Waldsee in Berlin, the Kunstverein in Dusseldorf, the Kunstverein in Hamburg and the Kunsthalle in Bielefeld. His third son, Pedro, was born in New York.
1971
He took an apartment on the Boulevard du Palais, on the Ile de la Cite in Paris, and divided his time between Paris, Bogota, and New York.
1972
In February, Botero held his first major exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery in New York. He acquired a new studio in Paris on the rue Monsieur-le-Prince and also a house in the country at Cajica, to the north of Bogota, where he was to spend several months each year.
1973
Botero set up a permanent home in Paris, where he ventured into sculpture and modelled his first bronzes. He exhibited in Italy at the Rome branch of the Marlborough Gallery, and presented a retrospective, Fernando Botero 1948-1972, at the San Carlos College in Bogota.
1974
An exhibition, Botero: Aquarelle and Zeichnungen (Botero: Watercolors and Drawings), opened at the Brusberg Gallery in Hanover. His youngest son, Pedro, died in a road accident in Spain. This event was to leave its mark on his work thereafter. He produced the sculpture Mano (Hand), which is considered one of his most important bronzes.
1975
Botero divorced his second wife, Cecilia Zambrano. He gave his Plegaria (Prayer) to the Antioquia museum. It was the first of many donations he would make to the institution. There was a Fernando Botero exhibition in Rotterdam.
1976
He married the Greek artist Sophia Vari. Following a major retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Caracas, Venezuela, he was personally invested with the Order of Andres Bello by the President of Venezuela. He also showed a collection of large watercolours at the Claude Bernard Gallery in Paris. For a while he devoted his time to sculpture. He did nearly twenty-five sculptures of a variety of subjects: torsos, cats, snakes, and enormous coffee pots.
1977
The regional government of Antioquia awarded him the Boyaca Cross for his services to Colombia. He inaugurated a room in the Zea Museum in Medellin in memory of his son Pedro and donated seventeen of his own works. Through the Claude Bernard Gallery, he was able for the first time to show his sculptures at the Paris Art Fair (FIAC) in the Grand Palais. Botero painted the series Despues de Velazquez (After Velazquez), derived from the Spanish master’s portraits of Infantas. These were the fruit of his profound analysis of the great artist.
1978
His Paris studio was moved to the Rue du Dragon, where it has remained ever since, and he started to paint again.
1979-1982
His paintings and sculptures were shown in several exhibitions across Europe:
Basel, Brussels, Lund, Hovikodden, Paris and Rome. In the US, he exhibited in New York, Philadelphia, Houston and Chicago. The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington gave him his first retrospective in the United States. He published a series of illustrated tales in the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo. In 1981, he exhibited in Tokyo and Osaka.
1983
The MoMA acquired Baile en Colombia (Dance in Colombia). He illustrated Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez for the first issue of the new Vanity Fair. He set up a studio in Italy at Pietrasanta, near the Carrara marble quarries. From that year onwards, he would regularly spend several months working with bronze founders and marble carvers. He began his series of drawings and paintings of bullfighting scenes.
1984
Botero donated three of his monumental sculptures to the San Antonio Park in Medellin, and eighteen paintings to the National Library in Bogota. He devoted most of his time to bullfights.
1985
At the end of April, the Marlborough Gallery in New York showed a series of twenty-five works on the theme of bullfighting. He also had a show at the Ponce Museum of Art in Puerto Rico.
1986
The exhibition Botero: Bilder, Zeichnungen (Botero: Paintings, Drawings) toured Munich, Bremen and Frankfurt. A retrospective of his works traveled to Tokyo, Sapporo, Osaka and Niigata.
1987
The retrospective Botero: pinturas, dibujos, esculturas (Botero: Paintings, Drawings, Sculptures) opened at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid. The traveling exhibition La Corrida, comprising eighty-six works, was shown in the Sala Viscontea of the Sforza Castle in Milan. An exhibition of paintings, sculptures, watercolours and drawings opened at the El Museo Gallery in Bogota.
1988
The La Corrida (The Bullfight) series was shown in the Castel dell’Ovo in Naples and the Albergo delle Povere in Palermo. The casino at Knokke-le-Zoute, Belgium, held a retrospective.
1989
The Coro Art Museum and the Caracas Museum of Modern Art housed the La Corrida: Paintings, Drawings, Sculptures exhibition, which moved later the same year to the Tamayo Contemporary Art Museum in Mexico City.
1990
A retrospective was held at the Pierre Gianadda Foundation in Martigny, Switzerland. There was an exhibition of his monumental sculptures in the Belvedere Fort in Florence. The Marlborough Gallery in New York also displayed some of his sculptures.
1991
The exhibition Fernando Botero opened at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome. It included oils, sculptures and drawings, along with the La Corrida series. Around this time there were shows in Switzerland, Belgium and the United States. He exhibited at the Brusberg Gallery in Berlin and at the Tokyo Marlborough Gallery.
1992
His monumental sculptures were shown for the first time at Monte Carlo, Monaco. The biggest exhibition of his monumental sculptures in a public space was held on the Champs-Elysées in Paris. His work was shown for the first time in Russia, at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. The exhibition Botero was shown in Madrid; it included a set of monumental sculptures in the Paseo de Recoletos.
1994
The bullfight pictures were shown in the Grand Palais in Paris. A traveling exhibition of his drawings of 1964-1986 toured the United Stated, visiting New York, Corpus Christi, Naples, Gainesville, Lafayette, Columbia and Lexington. In the course of his career, from 1994 onwards, he has exhibited in more than twenty of the world’s most prestigious cities, including: New York, Chicago, Buenos Aires, Madrid, Beverly Hills, Jerusalem, Washington, Lugano, Lisbon, Sao Paulo, Bamberg, Miami, Florence, Venice, Singapore, Tokyo, The Hague, Berlin and Saint-Tropez.
1995
A terrorist organization placed a bomb under the bronze statue Pajaro (Bird), which Botero had donated to the city of Medellin; the statue had been placed in the Plaza del Mercado. The attack cost the lives of twenty-three people and injured two hundred others. Botero gave Medellin another sculpture, La Paloma de la Paz (The Dove of Peace), that was placed beside the one that was destroyed.
1996
Botero showed a set of pastels at the Didier Imbert Fine Art Gallery in Paris. The Marlborough Gallery in New York organized a show of his most recent oil paintings. The second Botero traveling exhibition toured cites in Japan: this time it visited Tsukuba, Niigata and the Mitsukoshi Department Store. That same year, an exhibition of his work
opened in Kyungju, South Korea. Monumental Sculptures was organized by the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
1997
The Fernando Botero exhibition was shown at Lugano, the II Gabbiano Gallery in Rome and the Thomas Gallery in Munich.
1998
There were exhibitions of his work in Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Lisbon, Toronto, Bamberg, Berlin, Miami and Montevideo. The Sao Paulo Museum of Art held an exhibition of his paintings, drawings and sculptures.
1999
He became the first living artist to be invited to show his sculptures in the Piazza della Signoria and the Piazza degli Uffizi in Florence. His work was also shown in the Sala d’Arme of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. The Tel Aviv Museum of Art in Israel and the Museum of Modern Art in Monterrey, Mexico, both held Botero exhibitions.
2000
He made important gifts to Colombia when he handed over his entire collection of modern art to the Banco de la Republica (Central Bank of Colombia) in Santa Fe de Bogota. He had formed the collection over a period of twenty-five years. It included more than a hundred paintings, drawings and sculptures by himself and a collection, called the Botero Donation, containing works by 19th and 20th-century artists, including Pissarro, Corot, Monet, Renoir, Picasso, Degas, Matisse, Beckmann, Bacon, Dali, Lucian Freud and many others. To the Antioquia Museum in Medellin he gave 21 works by contemporary artists like Rosenquist, Wasselmann and Katz, as well as 114 of his own works. The same year, a square, the Plaza Botero, was laid out opposite the museum, and the artist gave 23 sculptures for it that are on permanent display there. As a result of these gifts, Colombia acquired significant collections representing trends in the history of art of the last 150 years, achieving Botero’s objective that “today’s Colombian artist ought not to be faced with the same problems as I encountered years ago. I had to learn to paint without being able to see the original of a single painting that was different from those being done in Latin America.”
2001
The exhibition Fernando Botero, 50 anos de vida artistica (Fernando Botero, 50 Years of a Life in Art) opened at the Ancient San Ildefonso College in Mexico City.
2002
The Moderna Museet in Stockholm presented the exhibition Botero, a retrospective that subsequently traveled to the ARKEN Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen.
2003
The exhibition Botero, oeuvres recentes (Botero, Recent Works) opened at the MaiIlol Museum in Paris. Some of Botero’s monumental sculptures were shown on the Grand Canal in Venice. At the same time the exhibition Botero a Venezia: sculture e dipinti (Botero in Venice: Sculptures and Paintings) was held in the Doge’s Palace.
2004
After seeing photos in the media of the abuse and torture of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Botero began a series of pictures on the subject. He also gave forty paintings and drawings from his series on violence in Colombia to the National Museum of Colombia. The Singapore Art Museum organized a retrospective of his paintings and monumental sculptures. The exhibition Botero in Ebisu was shown in Tokyo.
2005
The exhibition Fernando Botero opened at the Kunsthalle Wurth in Schwäbisch Hall, Germany. It was the first major Botero retrospective in that country for twenty years. The exhibition Fernando Botero: gli ultimi quindici anni (Fernando Botero: The Last Fifteen Years) was shown in the Palazzo Venezia, Rome.
2006
The collection Botero in Den Haag (Botero in The Hague) was shown in the
city of that name. A selection of paintings from the Abu Ghraib series was shown at the Marlborough Gallery in New York and afterwards at the Berkeley Art Museum of the University of California. The New York Times called it one of the most important exhibitions of the year. The Torreon de Lozoya in Segovia, Spain, presented an exhibition of his paintings, drawings and sculptures.
2007
The traveling exhibition The Baroque World of Fernando Botero visited the National Museum of Fine Arts in Quebec as well as nine American institutions located in the states of Texas, Oklahoma, Florida, Delaware, Louisiana, Tennessee, Colorado, Ohio and California. From July to September, a large sample of his paintings, drawings and sculptures was displayed in the Palazzo Reale, Milan. Botero made a gift to the Berkeley Art Museum from the series based on the Abu Ghraib abuses, comprising twenty-five paintings and twenty-two drawings. He exhibited at the American University Museum in Washington, and gave them some works from the same series. The Thomas Gallery, Berlin, displayed sixteen monumental sculptures in the historic heart of the city, among them Caballo, which was placed in front of the Brandenburg Gate. The others stood in the Lustgarten Park. He gave the National Museum of Colombia a collection of forty-eight paintings and drawings inspired by themes of violence in his native country. To celebrate his 75th birthday, the Fernando Pradillo Gallery in Madrid organized an exhibition in homage to him.
2008
His paintings and drawings of circus subjects were shown in Abu Dhabi, UAE. He showed Abu Ghraib— El Circo (Abu Ghraib — The Circus) in Valencia and Vigo, Spain. At the Global Philanthropy Forum in Miami, he was awarded the Philanthropist of the Year prize by the magazine Poder for his lifelong giving to the people of Colombia.
2009
A selection of paintings was displayed from the Abu Ghraib series at Monterrey, Mexico. A group of businessmen from the same town bought the bronze statue Caballo and gave it to the government of the state, to be placed in the Macroplaza (main square). During this journey, the Autonomous University of Nuevo Leon awarded him a doctorate honoris causa. The exhibition El dolor de Colombia (Colombia’s Suffering) was shown in the Diego Rivera Art Gallery at Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico. Other exhibitions include Fernando Botero, at the
National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul, South Korea, and Fernando Botero: gente del circo (Botero’s Circus People) at the Contini Art Gallery in Venice, the James Goodman Gallery in New York, and the Thomas Gibson Fine Art in London. He was awarded the Chancellor’s Citation by the University of California, Berkeley.
2010
He showed The Baroque World of Fernando Botero at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno. The exhibition Botero traveled to Budapest, Bogota and Istanbul. An exhibition of his monumental sculptures was mounted in Saint-Tropez.
2011
The Bank Austria Kunstforum, Vienna, mounted the exhibition Botero. The Baroque World of Fernando Botero was shown in Ohio. The first show of a series about the Stations of the Cross at the Marlborough Gallery, New York, was made up of oils and drawings on the theme of the Passion. In September, his work was exhibited in the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest. La Pinacoteca Comunale Casa Rusca in Locarno showed a collection of the artist’s work of the last fifteen years.
2012
Under the title Viacrucis: La Pasion (Via Crucis: the Passion) he exhibited his new series about the Stations of the Cross in the Antioquia Museum, Medellin; these were donated to its permanent collection. The rooms of the Monte Frumentario Palace in Assisi were the first to show the collection Los Yesos de Botero (Botero’s Plaster Casts), comprising 76 plasters and 44 drawings. Botero’s 80th birthday took place on 19 April, and celebrations were held in his honor in several cities. The Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City mounted a major retrospective entitled Fernando Botero, una Celebracion (A Celebration of Botero). The Samuelis Baumgarte Gallery, Bielefeld, displayed Fernando Botero — Hommage zum 80. Geburtstag (Fernando Botero — An Homage to His 80th Birthday), a selection of paintings, sculptures and drawings. From July to September there was an exhibition of his sculptures and drawings at Pietrasanta, where he had worked on his sculptures for the past twenty-five years. In October, the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum presented Fernando Botero: Celebracion (A Botero Celebration), a major anthology of his artistic career that brought together many of his works from over the past seventy-five years.
2015
Fernando Botero”, Seoul Arts Center, Seoul
2015-2016
“Botero in China”, The National Museum of China, Beijing
2016
“Botero: Celebrate Life!”, Kunsthal Rotterdam, Netherlands
2017
At present, Botero lives, works and divides his time between Monaco, Italy, Greece, the US and Colombia.
