Sotheby’s is showing Fernando Botero in New York from 22 July to 7 September, and the framing of the show is the interesting part. It is not a career retrospective. It is an argument about the artist’s relationship with the American art world, which is a narrower and more awkward subject than it sounds.
Botero died in 2023, having spent six decades making the most instantly recognisable figures in modern art. The volumes are the brand. A Botero is legible from across a room and from across a language barrier, which is exactly why serious criticism has struggled with him for fifty years. Recognisability reads as commercial success, commercial success reads as suspicion, and the work gets filed under decoration.
What the volume is actually for
The standard misreading is that Botero painted fat people. He did not, or not primarily. He inflated everything: fruit, guitars, horses, cats, cigarettes, the frame of a doorway. The distortion is applied uniformly to the world, not selectively to bodies, and once you notice that the subject stops being obesity and starts being sensuality of form.
His own account pointed at the Italian quattrocento, at Piero della Francesca and the sculptural certainty of early Renaissance volume, filtered through Latin American colonial painting. That lineage is easy to verify by looking. It is harder to see when the work arrives as a thirty-foot bronze outside a shopping centre, which is how most people meet it.
The part that gets left out
Any honest room devoted to Botero has to deal with the Abu Ghraib series. Between 2004 and 2005 he made more than eighty works based on published accounts of torture at the American-run prison in Iraq, using the same inflated bodies, the same soft palette. He refused to sell them and eventually gave the series to museums, including the Berkeley Art Museum.
They are difficult pictures precisely because the style does not change. The volume that reads as abundance in a still life reads as helplessness when a body is hooded and bound. It is the strongest evidence available that the manner was a language rather than a mannerism, and that he knew what it could carry.
An exhibition organised around Botero and America has an obvious reason to include that work and an equally obvious commercial reason to keep it at the edge of the room. Which choice the installation makes is the thing to look for.
Why now
Two years after an artist’s death is a predictable moment for the market to reassess. Estates settle, museums decide what they hold, and the price of a name stops being about the person and starts being about the supply. Summer shows in salerooms are where that reassessment gets rehearsed in public before it appears in a catalogue.
That is not a criticism, but it is a reason to read the wall texts with a particular kind of attention. The show runs to 7 September in New York, and whatever else it is, it is a rare chance to see a great deal of Botero in one place rather than one sculpture at a time in an airport concourse.