Juicy, sensual, architectonically harmonious yet bursting with vibrational energy, Fernando Botero’s monumental Variaciones sobre Cézanne is a crowning achievement from one of the artist’s most celebrated series. For over seven decades, Fernando Botero’s still lifes have remained the body of works most rooted in the historic tradition of the genre. Charmingly bruised apples, homely vases and acid-toned table-settings populate his whimsical reimaginings of the Old Master paintings he eagerly studied as a young artist in Europe during the 1950s. His encounters with the masterworks of Giotto, Michelangelo and Piero della Francesca in Italy, with the paintings of Sanchez-Cotán and Velázquez in Spain, and (critically) with Cézanne in France, among many others, informed his reinterpretations of these works from his early career until today.

In his still lifes, Botero intends to create a vibrant, otherworldly reality by dramatically exaggerating the shape and tonality of the chosen objects. “Deformation would be the exact word,” he says. “Art is deformation. There are no works of art that are truly realistic.” (quoted in Fernando Botero, German Arciniegas, New York, 1977, p. 53). Beginning in 1959, Botero began to exploit deformation as a formal solution to contemporary figurative painting; by the mid-1960s, he had developed an instantly recognizable, mature visual language of distortion. Here, the result is a larger-than-life, perfectly harmonious composition in which joyous volumes and rich, buoyant colors are united to present a remarkable whole.

Although the artist clearly references the work of Cézanne, uncharacteristically scrawling the title into the corner of the work itself with a wild exuberance - he revises the master's composition with his characteristic wit and sly humor. He abandons the colorful provençal tablecloth of Cézanne's backdrop to focus on the stark white of the cloth; prim bone china becomes FiestaWare, and each individual apple and orange among the abundant bevy of fruit is so inflated they seem poised to roll off of the tablecloth and into the lap of the observer. Crucially, Botero adds the easel at the far foreground of the painting, transforming the work from a reimagining of a composition to a portrait of the artist's studio itself. In this gesture, whose profundity belies the whimsy with which it is rendered, Botero asserts the existence of a joyfully kitschy reality underlying the elegant original painting - and places himself in the master's shoes.

By the end of the 1950s, Fernando Botero had mastered the foundations of his own distinct style of volumetric exaggeration. Once settled in New York in 1960, he began to achieve notable successes such as the purchase of Mona Lisa, Age Twelve (1959) by the Museum of Modern Art. While promising, this was also a period marked by harsh external criticism given Botero’s unwavering commitment to figuration in the face of the dominant New York School. In these years Botero perfected his figurative process; gradually his brushstroke lost its previous emphasis and speed and turned delicate; vibrating striations of color give way to rich, jewel-toned fields. By the time he executed Variaciones sobre Cézanne in 1963, the taste for Abstract Expressionism had begun to give way to a radically opposing movement that shared Botero's affinity for a wink and a nod: Pop Art.

The appearance of Botero's Variaciones sobre Cézanne series and Pop Art in New York in the early 1960s offers an interesting frame of comparison. Artists like Roy Lichtenstein processed the relentless consumerism of midcentury America with a certain sarcasm, applying the gleaming, plastic aesthetic of advertising to everyday subjects. Likewise Botero applies a certain irony in his processing of celebrated works of the Western canon, with a kindred impulse to reveal (and revel in) the artifice of these works. Later, he reflected - “without knowing it it was a little like the philosophy of Pop Art. Another thing I found was important was that - with a bold approach - the head is so overblown that it takes up the entire space. I’m not saying that I created this in American art but I wasn’t taking it from American artists.” (Fernando Botero, quoted in Exh. Cat., Washington, D.C., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Fernando Botero, 1979, p. 15) While the early series to which Variaciones sobre Cézanne belongs was executed prior to Botero’s knowledge of Pop Art, these works emerge from the same American zeitgeist, a shared impulse to reflect on the psychological impact of mass-produced images on Western culture in an era of rapid globalization.