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Delaware Art Museum Presents Fernando Botero

May 5, 2008 on 12:42 pm | In Books Guidebooks, East Coast, Museums, The South |

Wilmington, DE — The Delaware Art Museum presents “The Baroque World of Fernando Botero” (through June 8), a major retrospective exhibition featuring 100 paintings, sculptures, and drawings.

Fernando Botero (b. 1932), well known for his extravagantly rounded figures, is one of the most internationally popular artists working today. Using a broad range of media, the Colombian-born Botero has created an accessible and enigmatic world.

“Botero’s brilliant colors and massive forms make you stand up and take notice immediately,” said Dr. Mary F. Holahan, Curator of Collections and Exhibitions at the Delaware Art Museum. “But then his paintings and drawings and sculptures take you through a more subtle range of emotions—empathy, outrage, curiosity, and just plain good humor. The result is that you just keep wanting to come back to look again and again!”

The exhibit presents selections of the best works from various stages in Botero’s development as an artist. Drawn from his private collection and assembled over the past 50 years, this exhibition includes favorite works that the artist was unable to part with, as well as pieces reacquired years after they left his possession. Many have never before been exhibited in public. Three of Botero’s sculptures are being mounted in the Museum’s Copeland Sculpture Garden: Hand, Smoking Woman, and The Rape of Europa.

Fernando Botero’s roots are in Medellín, and his earliest artistic impressions were molded in a Colombian town near the Andes. His first images drew upon the Spanish colonial Baroque, a movement of extravagant richness, featuring the sumptuous decorations that flourish on the walls of churches in South America. Latin American Baroque imagery is reflected in Botero’s work when portraying himself as a small boy in the arms of Our Blessed Lady of Colombia, carrying a diminutive flag with the national colors, or in depictions of his mother as a widow, in her desperate struggle to survive with her three young children. Botero can also shock viewers with images of terror and violence, referring to political instability, attacks, kidnappings, and torture.

The exhibition follows Botero in his extensive studies of the history of European art, focusing on the influence of Velazquez in Spain; Ingres, Delacroix, and Courbet in France; and Renaissance artists in Italy. He also turned his attention to Mexico, where the monumental murals by Diego Rivera and David Siqueiros had a profound impact..

Botero’s superb craftsmanship is evident in his drawings, especially those executed in pastel. His pastels have a thoroughly finished look and a richness of color, and they have been compared to early etchings by Picasso. Botero has also worked in bronze and marble sculpture, a seminal element in his oeuvre. His monumental bronzes were seen along the Champs Elysées in Paris, in front of the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, and along Park Avenue in New York.

Founded in 1912, the Delaware Art Museum holds a world-renowned collection that focuses on American art and illustration from the 19th century to the present as well as the British Pre-Raphaelite movement. The Museum offers the outdoor Copeland Sculpture Garden, the Helen Farr Sloan Library & Archives, studio art classes, the interactive Kids’ Corner learning area, the delART Café featuring free Wi-Fi access, and the Museum Store.