Fernando Botero’s creative output has not slowed since he began his practice in the 1940s, yet despite decades of prolific painting, drawing, and sculpting, he has yet to return to the scale and nuance held in his large-scale, monochromatic works in charcoal and sanguine on canvas produced in the 1970s. In his 1971 Untitled, a woman dressed like a 1930s Hollywood actress stands centered against a window. Looking sweetly at her viewer, she holds her purse, gloves, and stole in her dainty hands. She blushes, hair coiffed, the contours of her figure visible through the diaphanous fabric of her dress.

Detail of the present work

Born in Medellín, Colombia in 1932, Botero attended the prestigious Academia San Fernando in Madrid in 1952. By the seventies, he had fully developed an immediately recognizable style. He was recognized internationally for his inflated figures and forms laced with cheeky humor, riffing on such diverse subjects as canonical works from the history of art to the bullfight to quotidian scenes and objects. Art historian Marc Fumaroli identified a Mannerist sensibility in Botero’s uncanny transformative abilities (Marc Fumaroli, Botero Drawings, Bogotá, 1999, 11)—Botero is a draftsman both serious and smiling, but it is in his limited series of oversize format pastels and charcoals that he boasts the scope of his technical mastery. The surface of the present work possesses an incandescent quality: the curtains look to be satin, her dress silk, her skin velvet. The textures are rich and luminous, and Botero partakes in the revitalization of techniques attributed to the Old Masters. On display in the present work is not only Botero’s volumetric play on his subjects but also his remarkable proficiency as a draftsman.