Fernando Botero (B. 1933)

Gary Nader Fine Arts, Miami
Acquired from the above by the present owner

If women are often my subjects, it’s because they have been

            one of the main subjects in painting for centuries. What really

            guides me above all, when I sculpt or paint men, women, animals,

or objects, is the plastic aspect of beings and things. Plasticity exists indiscriminately in a woman, a still life, or landscape.

--Fernando Botero

One of the most persistent images throughout the history of art from antiquity to the present is the female nude. From the Venus of Willendorf (24,000-22,000 B.C.), Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (c. 1485), and Velázquez’s Nude Maja (1797-1800) to Manet’s Olympia (1863), Picasso’s Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon (1907), and Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, (The Large Glass), (1915-23), representations of the female body have provided artists with fertile territory for exploring a range of formal, conceptual, political, and social concerns. Likewise, a mere cursory inventory of these masterpieces of Western art illustrate changing cultural or societal values vis à vis notions of gender, sexuality, and the body as well as the many artistic and formal conventions or tropes associated with this genre throughout the history of art.

The Colombian artist Fernando Botero is known for excavating the annals of Western art history for source material that he then ably transforms into his own distinct style in which his repertoire of rotund and disproportionate figures and inanimate objects are equally subjected to the same formal effects characterized by the artist’s barely perceptible brushwork and an overall flatness and smoothness that neutralizes his subjects and forever suspends them within reality and pictorial illusionism. While one cannot help but perceive a trace of irony in Botero’s use of appropriation or pastiche, his love of art history and his passion for painting are palatable as is evident in such remarks as, “I’m attracted to painters of the treccento and quatroccento—Giotto, Masaccio, Uccello, Piero della Francesca—and to such later artists as Rubens and Ingres. They all depict figures of a certain fullness. You’re attracted instinctively to a certain kind of art and your work takes a similar direction." (2)

Perhaps no subject matter has occupied Botero’s creative musings and production more than that of the female nude. And, while he has painted countless female figures in a variety of poses and situations, the reclining nude has proven to be particularly fascinating and provided the artist with ample opportunity to revisit and expand the formal tropes associated with this recurrent motif throughout the ages. Botero’s voluptuous nudes, such as the woman depicted in Reclining Nude are—unlike most of their historical forerunners—unabashedly confident, strong, and very au courant as is evident in her stylish accessories and hot pink polish on her dainty fingers and toes. Like Édouard Manet’s cosmopolitan femme fatale Olympia, Botero’s women are far from being delicate nymphs or love slaves. They own their pictorial space and stare back at the viewer with a certain matter-of-factness that neutralizes or challenges the proverbial “male gaze.” However, unlike Manet’s other iconic painting of female nudes, Les Dejeuner sur l’Herbe (1863), our protagonist is not subjugated to a secondary role as part of a larger grouping caught unexpectedly by the viewer in a moment of immodesty, but rather she alone dominates her territory and it is the viewer who seems to be caught off guard by her assuredness. Indeed, never voyeuristic, Botero’s sensuous reclining nudes invite the viewer into a dialogue that not only celebrates the female form in all its plenitude and exuberance à la baroque renderings of Rubens and Titian, but suggests a bridge between those art historical antecedents and the possibilities of painting and representations of the body and gender in contemporary art and culture today.

Likewise it is interesting to note that while representations of the female nude are often conflated with myriad symbolic and literal references to notions of womanhood, femininity, and traditional gender roles, they have also served to buttress or perpetuate ideas about beauty across cultures and centuries. Botero’s rotund ladies not only recall the well endowed woman of the aforementioned Baroque masters, but by painting these confident, joyous, plus size women the artist asserts an alternative standard of beauty that challenges prevailing Western ideals and those perpetuated by such contemporary popular and media icons as Kate Moss and Nicole Richie.

(1) Fernando Botero with an Introduction by Carlos Fuentes, Botero: Women, New York: Rizzoli, 2003, p. 34.

(2) Ibid., p. 165.