This series of images focuses on the contemporary Colombian artist (painter and sculptor), Fernando Botero. His themes cover self-portraits, portraits, nudes, love, bishops, military men, still lifes, bordellos, bullfights, and landscapes. Recently, he has done a dramatic series of paintings on the American Abu Graib disaster in Iraq. In his introduction to Botero; Paintings and Drawings (New York: Prestel, 2007), Werner Spies says this about Botero, with a quotation from the Peruvian novelist Vargas Llosa: "In sum, Botero's oeuvre is not only suffused with stupendous technical mastery and unparalleled knowledge of the museums; it is also imbued with a lucid awareness of personal origins that prevents him from succombing opportunistically to the blandishments of the international art scene. What Vargas Llosa notes with regard to his own experience applies to Botero as well: 'In everything Latin America has produced in the way of authentic art one finds a strange combination of attraction to, and rejection of, things European: the European tradition is either employed to different ends, or forms, motifs, and ideas are introduced into it that call the heritage in question or put it to the test, without, however, denying it'" (23).
Source of images on this page: 1-6 are thumbnails I have derived from images in Werner Spies's book cited above; 7-15 are thumbnails I have produced from my own tourist photographs of Botero's outdoor sculptures.
Humanities question: In the following Botero images, which one illustrates most clearly the content of Vargas Llosa's critical comment?