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W hen preparations were beginning for the Botero in New York exhibition—hosted by Sotheby’s at the Breuer in partnership with The Botero Foundation—Lina and Juan-Carlos Botero opened their father’s storage unit. Beyond the treasure trove of artwork found inside, it provided a unique insight into their father’s experience during the years he lived and worked in New York City. Scrawled beside sketches were observations on process, ideas, discoveries, and thoughts that were too urgent not to record. What they found were the notes of a young artist, someone facing financial struggles, and the itch of ambition—an experience that will feel familiar to many New Yorkers.
In 1960, Botero arrived in Manhattan with only $200 to his name (the equivalent of roughly $2,000 today). What followed were years of financial and professional uncertainty.
But, he wasn’t completely unprepared. Botero had already spent years studying at the prestigious Academia San Fernando in Madrid with a scholarship from the Colombian government, and had secured solo exhibitions in his native country as well as in Washington, D.C., earning a Guggenheim International Award and going on to be included in the Venice Biennale and the Sao Paulo Bienal, all before he was 30 years old. In New York, he would go on to concretize and develop the singular visual language that began to take shape in those early years, informed by the Western canon yet entirely new.
“He told us that, at one point, his bank account came down to ten dollars,” recounts his daughter, Lina Botero. Then, serendipitously, “somebody came knocking and put a wad of cash through the mailbox slot…my father was desperate at the time so he actually opened the door.” The offer was simple: $10 per drawing. “My father had just finished a series of drawings…and [the buyer] said, I'll give you ten dollars for each, not eleven…ten.” Minutes later, they left carrying seventy sketches; Botero was left with $700 and a cushion: enough time to continue painting on his own terms.
Botero would spend hours at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which he treated not as an expansive escape, but as a resource to study. He returned to particular paintings again and again, standing silently before them for long stretches. This approach carried throughout the rest of his life: when he moved to Paris after New York, he treated The Louvre in a similar manner.
His years in New York were bookended by two major shows: one in 1962 at The Contemporaries Gallery, and another in 1969 exhibition at The Center for Inter-American Relations. He was haunted by the negative reception by certain critics at both shows. Lina, aged nine at the time of the Center for Inter-American Relations (known today as The Americas Society), notes, “it was the first time I ever saw my father truly depressed. He was not at all a depressive person, but the art critics were so vicious and so brutal against him and his work that it was really, really hard for him."
It is worth noting that the reviews were not always bad—in fact many critics heaped praise upon him. In a 1972 review of his exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery, the arts writer Peter Schmeldahl wrote in The New York Times: "As it happens, Botero is a marvelous painter. Nothing in his pictures is superfluous to their design, which holds his sensuously undulant, perfectly modeled and proportioned forms firmly in a shallow space, like that of Early Italian painting."
A decade earlier, Mona Lisa, Age Twelve was acquired by MoMA in 1961 (on the urging of curator Dorothy C. Miller, who visited his studio)—a major moment for Botero and for figuration in general which had fallen out of favor.
Even so, he struggled. The 1960s, after all, were about Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. Botero’s work was neither. That independence is something Anna Di Stasi, Global Head of Latin American Art for Sotheby’s, believes defines this period. “What's remarkable is that his deepest artistic conversations during those years were not necessarily with the artists around him in New York.”
She continues, “They were with the artists he had studied throughout his life: Leonardo, Velázquez, El Greco, Rubens, and especially Cézanne. He wasn't interested in breaking with the past. He wanted to engage with it and build something new from it.” His conviction as an artist was born not from a place of stubbornness but from a more earnest sense of self, someone engaged in the past and the world around him yet clear in where he wanted his place to be.
Sotheby’s Nick Deimel, Head of Private Sales Modern Art, explains how Botero in New York provides insight into Botero’s personal drive , “[it] traces an artist who was ambitious in his desire to produce and contribute to the larger discourse of twentieth century art and into the twenty-first century.” Two self portraits included in the exhibition, both created in New York, are particularly emblematic of this mentality; “In both self portraits the artist is shown as a baby, in confident pose, demonstrating the conviction that becoming a painter was not a path for him to find, but a vocation from the very first days.”
Despite the hardships, Botero’s children—who split their time between Colombia and New York—remember that time as one of joy and generosity. “Our experience with him at those times was absolutely magical, fantastical. It was one of the best periods of our lives, of our childhood with him. [And yet] In those times it was such a dark period for him,” says Juan Carlos.
Fernando Botero Zea, Botero’s eldest son, concurs: “he would ask us what we would like to do. We were small children. We would always say we want to go see The Sound of Music or Mary Poppins, so we ended up seeing The Sound of Music seven times and Mary Poppins eight times. My father deserves a medal for suffering that.”
It may not all have been suffering. Visible in the works on view at the Breuer right now is a sense of playfulness and humor. Flies buzz around a riot of color in Le Buffet (1970). A little boy in a sailor suit must fend off the angel and devil on his shoulder during his first communion in Autorretrato, el día de mi primera comunión (1970). A voluminous woman tries—and fails—to cover herself with a magenta towel in Woman in the Bathroom (2002). Of course, this style emerged from his years in New York. “Where else would this vocation and confidence be truly nurtured and solidified” says Deimel, “than at the very epicenter of the art world of the 1960s and 1970s?”
