L a casa de Ana Molina marks the apex of a brief, seminal series of works in sanguine or charcoal on canvas that Fernando Botero executed through the 1970s. Imposing in scale and breathtaking in detail, these works are drawn with an exacting technique last seen in the eighteenth century. Like Rosalba Carriera or Jean-Etienne Liotard before him, the Colombian artist exploits the malleability of these soft pigments to create a richly dimensional surface, with gleaming highlights and deep, lifelike shadows. In the present work, La casa de Ana Molina, Botero uses these tools to sly effect—revisiting the canonical theme of brothels and prostitution from a distinctly Latin American perspective.
Every Latin American will find in [Botero’s] kaleidoscope of images certain feeling, dreams and modes of behavior that are entirely typical of towns and villages throughout the continent.
Emerging to auction for the first time from the esteemed collection of the Nassau County Museum of Art, La casa de Ana Molina is the finest of this series to appear in the market in decades. The work relates closely to La casa de las gemelas Arias, the prior world record for a painting by the artist—painted just a year earlier, it embodies the same fundamental themes around the image of the courtesan in history and in the Latin American imaginary explored in the text by Edward J. Sullivan that follows here below. However, La casa de Ana Molina seems to offer a more tender look at a moment of domestic life in this red-light district. Here, two children of the house doze and tumble peacefully at their mothers’ feet; the women repose languidly, drinking, embracing one another - their customer almost an afterthought. Botero joyfully renders society's lowliest characters in heroic scale.
Fernando Botero is one of the twentieth century’s most cosmopolitan artists. Nevertheless, all of Botero’s work, no matter what the subject, is infused with the air of his native Colombia. The individuals one sees daily on the streets of Bogotá, Medellín, Cali or Barranquilla constitute the cast of characters that populates his paintings, drawings and sculptures. The Colombian land—or city—spaces are often observed in the backgrounds of his pictures as are the fruits, vegetables and flowers of his childhood home—the region of Antioquia—in his still lifes. This is not to say, however, that Botero ‘documents’ Colombian reality. As the art historian Sam Hunter has commented, Botero displays a detachment from the specifics of Colombian life which allows him to “preserve the fabulous and heraldic qualities of [Jorge Luis] Borges’ work of the imagination without sacrificing the bitter revelations of social existence in his native Latin America.” Many of Botero’s finest paintings represent a mélange of his own lived experiences with scenes of the most exaggerated dramatic elements inherent to life in South America. This is true in the case of a series of paintings and drawings executed in the early 1970s on the theme of prostitutes and brothels.
A number of years ago, while attending a reception given for Botero in Medellín to celebrate his donation of a number of his sculptures to the museum, the artists recounted to me an anecdote that bears an important relationship to this painting. “When I was about thirteen years old,” said the artist, “I would go to several of the whorehouses in the red district in Medellín. I would talk to the prostitutes—who all seemed very old to me then (they were probably in their twenties). I was fascinated by them and really liked them. Many years later, when I had a large show of my work in Colombia, I received a letter from one of them with whom I had been particularly friendly. It was a love letter! I was thrilled and touched and it made me remember every moment of those days.” Botero’s ability to recall the most powerful memories of his youth and depict them in his art is a pervasive quality in his work that lends to it a curious poignancy mixed at times with melancholy.
In his monograph on the artist, Carter Ratcliff links Botero’s representations of prostitutes to his interest in Lucas Cranach’s images of single standing courtesans. The artist has stated that “At the source of [my figures of prostitutes] is my love for Cranach. All his courtesans have so much going on in the dresses, the jewelry, the hats.” In [this suite of works, including] La casa de Ana Molina and La casa de las gemelas Arias, however, Botero has transcended his European inspiration and returned with affection to the brothels he knew in his youth. He has also created sculptural works with the theme of prostitution.
We have seen how Botero has connected his brothel pictures to the depictions of courtesans by Cranach. It is also significant to keep in mind that these works enter into an age-old dialogue with the many scenes of courtesans, prostitutes and brothel interiors in the Renaissance to the present. Works such as Carpaccio’s Courtesans of circa 1510, the various representation of similar figures by the anonymous painters of the School of Fontainebleau (mid 16th century), as well as the more famous nineteenth century images like Ingres’ harem scenes or Manet’s Olympia form important components of the visual heritage of which the La casa de Ana Molina partakes. In addition, we cannot discount the affinities with works of literary art that this important painting recalls. The parallel between the visual imagery of Botero and the sumptuously fertile description of this countryman and friend Gabriel Garcia Márquez have often been noted. As the Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa observed: “Every Latin American will find in [Botero’s] kaleidoscope of images certain feeling, dreams and modes of behavior that are entirely typical of towns and villages throughout the continent. “
Finally, we must comment on the role of machismo in this work. Is Botero presenting us with a view of a place in which the male prerogative is dominant? Is this painting simply another image of male domination and subjugation of women? I believe that the truth is that the situation is just the opposite. While the men have come to the brothel to be sexually serviced by the woman, it is the women themselves who are in complete control. In fact, the males play a secondary role in the composition… The women are self-possessed, cool and alert to the situation. Thus the artist effects a gloss on the traditional machista aspect of his culture. While his self-proclaimed interest in sensual beauty and pleasure is suggested, his ability at wry social commentary (present in one form or another in nearly every image he creates) establishes this work as a masterpiece of ironic satire.
Dr. Edward Sullivan
