Softening the Face of Medellin

Most people would have given up on peace after the statue of a dove exploded in a downtown park, killing 27 residents of this city that christened a cocaine cartel.

But not Fernando Botero.

Latin America’s best-known living artist has set out to bring peace to his hometown with the same determination that has kept him defiantly creating voluptuous images even when the fashion was abstract for art and willowy for bodies. Armed only with a paintbrush, he has thrown down a palette, instead of a gauntlet, against violence.

Botero has donated much of his private art collection and $1 million to rejuvenate this old industrial city’s decrepit downtown. City fathers, desperate to find any solution to Medellin’s violence, have enthusiastically embraced his plan.

“This is a plan to change the face of Medellin,” Botero said as he directed workers who were hanging paintings. “This will no longer be the city of the cartel, or the city of the assassins or the city of dozens of murders every Sunday. We are going to make this city a cultural capital. This is the first step in transforming the urban culture.”

Botero, 68, stands out against the canvas of Latin American art as clearly as one of his own abundant figures. His painting of bordello women sold for $1.5 million at Sotheby’s, and sculptures like the dove that an unknown bomber destroyed in 1995 can run more than $500,000.

He is photographed in Monte Carlo’s casinos with Prince Rainier and at Spanish bullfights in white linen suits that set off his graying goatee and combed-back hair. Yet the international artist is still so Colombian that he speaks even foreign languages with a Paisa accent, the distinctive staccato of Medellin voices, says his older brother, David.

Botero suffers for his country, caught in a four-sided civil war financed largely by the illegal drug trade, and for his city, besieged by gangs that whip up a homicide rate that is 15 times higher than in the rest of Latin America.

He was so outraged when police found two of his paintings in the home of the late drug lord Pablo Escobar in the early ‘90s that he telephoned a national newspaper to tell readers: “I feel repugnance that my name should be linked to Pablo Escobar’s because of those paintings. I did not sell them to him or know they were there.”

He stopped speaking to his son Fernando for three years after he was convicted of channeling money from drug traffickers into the 1994 Colombian presidential campaign.

Picassos, Chagalls and Miros Are Donated

Given the magnitude of the devastation facing Colombia and the hope provided by a nascent peace movement, Botero decided that personal integrity isn’t enough. He began by making his work a testimony to the levels of depravity that Colombia has reached.

Now, he’s taking a public stand against violence by donating 120 artworks from his personal collection--Picassos, Chagalls and Miros as well as many of his own sculptures and paintings--to form the core of two new museums, one here and one in Bogota, the capital. On Tuesday, the Bogota museum was dedicated.

First, he replaced the mutilated dove. Then, he put up money to create Botero City, three blocks of parks and museums in downtown Medellin.

Sculptures once exhibited in Central Park and along the Champs-Elysees have found a permanent home in a sculpture park created after a block of crumbling buildings was ripped out. The office walls have been torn out of the Art Deco City Hall--built in 1932, the year Botero was born--to provide a showcase for the other work.

“He always thinks big,” said Beatriz Gonzalez, head curator of the National Museum in Bogota, commenting on both Botero’s work and his life. “Who else would give away such a collection?”

It is a crusade that perhaps could only be led by a seamstress’ son who rebelled against family and critics to become one of the world’s most successful artists. Bringing peace to Medellin--and to Colombia--through art is almost as improbable as Botero’s life story.

His father was David Botero, a mule-train driver who arrived home after frequent trips to bring laughter to their modest house, the teamster’s oldest son and namesake remembers. Their father died when Fernando was 4, plunging their mother into permanent mourning.

“The house would be silent, and suddenly we would hear a heart-rending howl: ‘Ay, David,’ ” the younger David recalled. “Then, Mother went back to her sewing. That happened five or six times a day for the rest of her life.”

The family was desperately poor, but somehow Fernando was able to get money for a set of watercolors when he was 13 or 14.

He painted several scenes of bullfights and convinced a merchant who sold tickets to the events to put them in his window. One painting sold for two pesos, about $2 in those days.

“He gave me the money, I put it in my pocket and ran home to tell my brothers,” the artist recalled. “I lost the money, and they didn’t believe me.”

The bullfight has become a theme in Botero’s work and fills two rooms in the Medellin collection. Like his other subjects, Botero’s matadors, picadors and even his bulls are opulent--he dislikes the word “fat.”

“I did my first watercolors in 1949, and one can see the interest in volume,” he said. “Later, I arrived in Florence, and of course Florentine art has volume--they invented volume.”

In those days, his paintings were similar to Italian work, he said. Then he found his own way to express volume, what became the key to his work.

“I was drawing a mandolin, and I made the sound hole very small, which made the mandolin look gigantic,” Botero said, his usual rapid-fire speech becoming even speedier with the excitement of recalling the revelation. “I saw that making the details small made the form monumental. So in my figures, the eyes, the mouth are all small and the exterior form is huge.”

After finding his style, Botero still had to face the critics. “It’s easy to forget what a difficult road he had to travel,” said his son Juan Carlos, a novelist who lives in Miami.

Botero moved to a Greenwich Village loft in 1960, when Abstract Expressionism dominated art, especially in New York. A critic for ARTnews magazine described his images as “fetuses begotten by Mussolini on an idiot peasant woman.”

Then the gallery that had represented Botero closed, leaving the divorced weekend father penniless.

“I used my imagination to make up for the lack of money,” said the man who now jets between homes in New York, Paris, Monte Carlo and Pietrasanta, Italy. “The only places you can go for free in New York are the cemetery and Central Park.”

So he told his two boys and daughter, Lina, ghost stories among the tombs. “I grew up believing that Tarzan lived in Central Park and that there were piranhas in the park ponds,” said Juan Carlos.

Fernando, now a college professor in Mexico City, remembers that one Christmas season, the four collected scraps outside a tin factory. With the metal, Botero made his children into knights in shining armor.

Besides imagination, they learned discipline from their father, the children say. “He taught us that the artist is not the person sitting around in cafes,” Juan Carlos said. “He is the person who is working.”

Botero still works eight hours a day, seven days a week. “The truth is, I haven’t found anything more fun than work,” he confessed.

Botero has mastered a wide variety of techniques--from the brush strokes of Mexican muralist Jose Clemente Orozco to Italian fresco. While his settings and many of his subjects come from the rural Colombia of the 1950s, curator Gonzalez said, “he has presented his work in a language that Europeans understand.”

According to art historian Natalia Gutierrez, “He assimilates influences . . . and makes them very personal.”

While Botero’s fascination with abundance has remained constant, his themes have changed.

After his 4-year-old son, Pedro, died in a 1964 car crash that severed one of Botero’s fingers and left him with limited movement in his right arm, the boy became his subject. The figures were still Rubenesque but were infused with a tenderness markedly different from the humor for which he’s known.

A Testimony to the Insanity

Lately, he has put aside fantasies of plump fruit attacked by worms or anachronistic self-portraits with his favorite artists from centuries past to tackle contemporary reality.

“I used to preach that art was a sort of oasis, a parallel reality [that was] a refuge from the hard reality of life,” he said. “But Colombia has become so horrendous--the drama, the massacres, the terrorism reached a point where it was impossible to escape the moral commitment to leave a testimony to the moment of insanity. So I began to paint those kinds of works, and I continue to paint them.”

Rebels, massacres, car bombs, funeral processions and even Pablo Escobar appear in his latest paintings. The bloated images are softened: The “Guerrillas” look like peasants with machine guns--as many are--just as his military dictators in the 1970s looked like toy soldiers.

Botero insisted that his purpose isn’t political. “Art can be a political weapon, but that is not what I am doing,” he said. “I do not want to compromise the quality of the art. . . . A painter’s first duty is to paint well.”

Once that art is produced, however, he enthusiastically undertakes the task of using it for social change, as he is doing with the museums.

“Medellin, when I was a boy, was a much smaller city of 200,000 people . . . a clean, religious city whose people were isolated by the mountains,” he said. “Suddenly, this mess comes along and it becomes the city of the cartel and Pablo Escobar, but I think that era has passed.

“What I am doing here is a justification for my life,” he said. “I have the sensation of doing something good for people, more than being a trendy artist or a successful artist. . . . Thousands of people are going to enjoy this. That’s a tremendous pleasure.”

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Darling, The Times’ San Salvador Bureau chief, was recently on assignment in Medellin.