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拍品专文
“The problem is to establish where the pleasure comes from when you look at a painting,” Botero once remarked. “For me, it is the exaltation of life communicated by the sensuality of forms. Then, my formal problem is to create sensuality through forms.”[1] Famed for the lushly proportioned, pillowy bodies of his now-eponymous subjects, Botero has applied his facetious wit to subjects spanning Colombia’s military junta and its red-light district, Catholic clergy and the bourgeoisie. Since his first departure for Europe in 1952, he has drawn from myriad art-historical sources—Titian and Velázquez; Giotto and Masaccio; Rubens and Ingres—and embraced the classical sensuality of volume, space, and color in legions of stylized “Boteromorphs.” Enamored as a boy of the glamorous “Vargas girls” that he saw in Esquire magazine, he has long since cultivated an aesthetics of abundance in figures whose amplitude defies fashionable conventions of beauty. Formidable and yet charmingly naïve, his subjects play out scenes and drollery from everyday life, characteristically sourced from the idealized world of Medellín, his birthplace.
Among Botero’s most enduring subjects are clerical figures—bishops and archbishops, cardinals and popes, priests and nuns—who descend from Old Master forebears but live, mostly peacefully, in Botero’s ageless Antioquian world. “Like his Renaissance masters,” the Peruvian writer and intellectual Mario Vargas Llosa has observed, “Botero has filled his pictures with clerics more for visual than spiritual reasons, and by so doing, he linked his work to those mentors and he expressed a world in which, in effect, as in the Italy of the City States, the Church was omnipresent.”[2] Botero concedes as much, allowing that he “was totally involved in and enamoured with the Quattrocento.” Yet his clerics inhabit a fully modern Latin American world, a society in which Catholicism has long been ubiquitous in public life and culture. “I could not of course now paint characters of the Quattrocento,” he recognized. “My priests were contemporary, but out of the Middle Ages.”[3]
“I started painting bishops because they provide an artist with wonderful coloristic and
formal opportunities,” Botero explains. “There’s nothing less attractive to paint than contemporary dress. In the Quattrocento, say, things were quite different: people had one leg red, one green. There was a wealth of bold color which virtually painted itself: you just took your brush and reproduced the colors....To then see a bishop in his red vestments—that’s a wonderful sight! That’s abundance! So I became interested in bishops because they gave me a chance to use red. That allowed me greater freedom in the deployment of color....The various extravagant vestments of bishops and priests offer marvelous coloristic possibilities.”[4]
A splendid example of Botero’s chromatic touch, Bishop in the Forest contrasts the rich rubescence of its titular subject against a dense forest of trees, leafy and luminously emerald-green. A wine-red cassock, tied with a pink sash, drapes around his stout figure; an ivory cape and mitre frame his rounded, rosy face. He stands preposterously tall, the top of his mitre rising above the tree canopy; a miniature umbrella provides the tiniest modicum of protection. The exaggerated volumes and disproportionate scale heighten the absurdity of the scene, cushioning its gentle social satire. The painting’s paradisiac setting suggests near incredulous innocence and peace at a time when the Church was implicated in the excesses of La Violencia (1948-58), a bloody period of political warfare and partisanship.
“There’s an element of satire as well, because the Church has always been very powerful in Colombia and has done a lot of harm,” Botero acknowledges. “At that time,” he recalls of his childhood in Medellín, “it was overpowering, occupying not only the churches but the streets as well. I remember the funeral procession of one of our most important bishops, his body dressed in red on the catafalque and accompanied by hundreds of priests on its progress through the town.”[5] Botero memorialized fallen clergy in The Dead Bishops (1965), a monumental portrayal of heaping bodies at rest, but his bishops generally fare far better, placidly dozing (The Sleeping Bishop, 1957), swimming (Bathing Bishops in a River, 1967), walking (Trip to the Ecumenical Council, 1972), or otherwise losing themselves in nature (Bishop Lost in the Woods, 1970). Taking his place among these serene brethren, the subject of Bishop in the Forest stands in timeless, beatific grace, his existence both a disquisition on the color red and a veiled commentary on the place, and complicity, of the Church.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
Among Botero’s most enduring subjects are clerical figures—bishops and archbishops, cardinals and popes, priests and nuns—who descend from Old Master forebears but live, mostly peacefully, in Botero’s ageless Antioquian world. “Like his Renaissance masters,” the Peruvian writer and intellectual Mario Vargas Llosa has observed, “Botero has filled his pictures with clerics more for visual than spiritual reasons, and by so doing, he linked his work to those mentors and he expressed a world in which, in effect, as in the Italy of the City States, the Church was omnipresent.”[2] Botero concedes as much, allowing that he “was totally involved in and enamoured with the Quattrocento.” Yet his clerics inhabit a fully modern Latin American world, a society in which Catholicism has long been ubiquitous in public life and culture. “I could not of course now paint characters of the Quattrocento,” he recognized. “My priests were contemporary, but out of the Middle Ages.”[3]
“I started painting bishops because they provide an artist with wonderful coloristic and
formal opportunities,” Botero explains. “There’s nothing less attractive to paint than contemporary dress. In the Quattrocento, say, things were quite different: people had one leg red, one green. There was a wealth of bold color which virtually painted itself: you just took your brush and reproduced the colors....To then see a bishop in his red vestments—that’s a wonderful sight! That’s abundance! So I became interested in bishops because they gave me a chance to use red. That allowed me greater freedom in the deployment of color....The various extravagant vestments of bishops and priests offer marvelous coloristic possibilities.”[4]
A splendid example of Botero’s chromatic touch, Bishop in the Forest contrasts the rich rubescence of its titular subject against a dense forest of trees, leafy and luminously emerald-green. A wine-red cassock, tied with a pink sash, drapes around his stout figure; an ivory cape and mitre frame his rounded, rosy face. He stands preposterously tall, the top of his mitre rising above the tree canopy; a miniature umbrella provides the tiniest modicum of protection. The exaggerated volumes and disproportionate scale heighten the absurdity of the scene, cushioning its gentle social satire. The painting’s paradisiac setting suggests near incredulous innocence and peace at a time when the Church was implicated in the excesses of La Violencia (1948-58), a bloody period of political warfare and partisanship.
“There’s an element of satire as well, because the Church has always been very powerful in Colombia and has done a lot of harm,” Botero acknowledges. “At that time,” he recalls of his childhood in Medellín, “it was overpowering, occupying not only the churches but the streets as well. I remember the funeral procession of one of our most important bishops, his body dressed in red on the catafalque and accompanied by hundreds of priests on its progress through the town.”[5] Botero memorialized fallen clergy in The Dead Bishops (1965), a monumental portrayal of heaping bodies at rest, but his bishops generally fare far better, placidly dozing (The Sleeping Bishop, 1957), swimming (Bathing Bishops in a River, 1967), walking (Trip to the Ecumenical Council, 1972), or otherwise losing themselves in nature (Bishop Lost in the Woods, 1970). Taking his place among these serene brethren, the subject of Bishop in the Forest stands in timeless, beatific grace, his existence both a disquisition on the color red and a veiled commentary on the place, and complicity, of the Church.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park