Fernando Botero, the Colombian whose lush paintings and sculptures of overstuffed generals, bishops, prostitutes, housewives and other products of his whimsical imagination made him one of the world’s best-known artists, died Friday in Monaco. He was 91.
His death at a hospital was confirmed by a close friend, Mauricio Vallejo, a co-owner of a Houston art gallery, who said the cause was complications of pneumonia. Colombian President Gustavo Petro previously announced the death on social media.
As a young artist, Mr. Botero developed an immediately recognizable style and enjoyed great and immediate commercial success. Fans sought his autograph and were known to wait for him at airports.
“’It’s the job you do when you want to starve,’ people always told me,” he once recalled. “Yet I had such a strong urge to go for it that I never thought about the consequences.”
Mr. Botero was permanently associated with the voluptuous, rounded figures that filled his paintings. He portrayed middle-class life and brothels, clergy and farmers, bulging fruit baskets and the grim effects of violence.
Fernando Botero Angulo was born on April 19, 1932 in the Colombian city of Medellín. His father died when he was still a child. An uncle enrolled him at a Jesuit high school, encouraged his artistic interests and supported him for two years in his training to become a matador. Bullfighting scenes appear in some of his earliest works and he followed bullfighting throughout his life.
After Mr. Botero published an article entitled “Pablo Picasso and Nonconformity in Art,” he was expelled from his Jesuit school because it expressed ideas that were considered “irreligious.” His early influences included Cubism, Mexican murals, and the pin-up art of Alberto Vargas, whose “Vargas Girl” drawings he saw in Esquire magazine.
As a teenager he began publishing illustrations in a local newspaper, worked as a set designer and moved to the capital Bogotá in 1951. After his first solo exhibition there, he moved to Paris and lived there and in Florence, Italy, for several years.
In 1961, New York curator Dorothy Miller bought a Botero work, “Mona Lisa, Age Twelve,” for the Museum of Modern Art. It was a surprising choice, since abstract expressionism was in vogue at the time and Mr. Botero’s sketchy portrait of a chubby child seemed out of place. It was exhibited while the original Mona Lisa was on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Modern attention to his work helped Mr. Botero gain fame. In 1979 he was the subject of a retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington. Many of his pictures showed corpulent figures somewhere between caricature and pathos.
“A perfect woman in art can turn out to be banal in reality, like a photo in Playboy,” Mr. Botero argued. “The most beautiful women in art, like Mona Lisa herself, were ugly in real life. There are those who see the outrageousness in my work, but my work is what it is.”
A review of the Hirshhorn exhibition was headlined “Botero, One Hundred Thousand Dollars for a Painting of His in Washington.” This reflected the view of some critics that Mr. Botero’s work was banal, self-referential and out of touch with the vibrant currents of contemporary art.
“The critics have written about me with anger and fury my whole life,” Mr. Botero complained.
Arts journalist Godfrey Barker wondered in the London Evening Standard in 2009: “Wow, do they loathe him?”
“The high priests of contemporary art in London and New York can’t stand him because he defies everything they believe in,” Mr. Barker wrote. “They hate him even more because he is rich, has immense commercial success, is pleasing to the eye and is very popular with the common people.”
Mr. Botero and his first wife, Gloria Zea, who became Colombia’s culture minister, divorced in 1960 after they had three children: Fernando, Lina and Juan Carlos. He spent much of the next decade and a half in New York. Ms. Zea died in 2019. He was married two other times, to Cecilia Zambrano and in 1978 to Sophia Vari, a Greek painter and sculptor. Ms. Vari died in May.
He is survived by his three children from his first marriage, a brother, Rodrigo, and grandchildren.
Two misfortunes shaped Mr. Botero’s family life. In the 1970s, his five-year-old son, Pedro, from his second marriage, died in a car accident in which Mr. Botero was injured. His son Fernando Botero Zea, a Colombian politician who became defense minister, served 30 months in prison after being convicted in a corruption scandal.
In the 1970s, Botero’s interest in form led him to sculpture. His sculptures, many of which depict voluptuous, whimsically tall people, gave him a new level of public visibility. Major cities pushed to place them along major streets, including in New York’s Park Avenue median in 1993. Several of these are on permanent display in non-traditional spaces, from the foyer of the Deutsche Bank Center (formerly the Time Warner Center) in New York to a lounge at the Grand Wailea Resort in Hawaii called Botero Bar.
Mr. Botero was an avid art collector and in 2000 donated part of his collection to a museum in his hometown of Medellín. Some of his works are interpretations of masterpieces by artists such as Caravaggio, Titian and van Gogh.
Mr. Botero usually portrayed his powerful men with at least a touch of irony or satire. But although they may appear mischievous or smug, and almost all of them are of exaggerated proportions, he gave them a measure of dignity.
Jesus has been the subject of Mr. Botero in several powerful works. He painted portraits of Delacroix, Ingres and Giacometti. His authority paintings such as “Cardinal,” “The English Ambassador,” “The First Lady” and two entitled “The President,” which he painted in 1987 and 1989, are gently sympathetic. He gave corpulent dignity to a man who smoked and a woman who stroked a cat.
However, many of his subjects were puffy tapestries of flesh, bursting from the confines of uniforms, dresses and towels and unable to cover excessively large areas. He insisted that he never painted fat people, saying he only wanted to glorify the sensuality of life.
“I studied the art of Giotto and all the other Italian masters,” he once said. “I was fascinated by their sense of volume and monumentality. Of course, everything in modern art is exaggerated, and so my voluminous figures were also exaggerated.”
Mr. Botero and Ms. Vari maintained homes in Paris and Pietrasanta, Italy, where an exhibition was held in 2012 to mark his 80th birthday.
Some who viewed Mr. Botero’s art as essentially playful and lighthearted were surprised when, in 2005, he created a series of graphic paintings based on photographs of prisoners being mistreated at the American prison in Abu Ghraib, Iraq.
“This work is the result of the outrage that the violations in Iraq have caused me and the rest of the world,” he said.
New York Times art critic Roberta Smith wrote that the Abu Ghraib paintings “restore the dignity and humanity of the prisoners without diminishing their agony or the injustice of their situation.” Writer and critic Erica Jong called them “astonishing” and claimed they argued for “a complete overhaul of what we have previously thought about Botero’s work.”
“When we think of Colombian artist Fernando Botero, most of us imagine his chubby people flaunting their fat, their fashionable headdresses, their cigarettes and cigarette holders, their excess,” Ms. Jong wrote. “I never thought of these images as political images until I saw Botero’s Abu Ghraib series.” Now she added: “For me, all of Botero’s works are a testament to the brutality of the haves against the have-nots.”
Mr. Botero had previously worked on political issues, particularly the Colombian drug trade, but subsequently returned to quieter projects. After the Abu Ghraib series, he produced a series of circus paintings and then rediscovered his long-standing love of still life.
“After all this time,” he said in 2010, “I always go back to the simplest things.”
Ashley Shannon Wu contributed reporting.