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Lot Essay
In the early 1950s, Fernando Botero was a young aspiring artist living in Bogotá, far removed from the epicenter of the art world in New York. While early success with his first solo exhibition at Galería Leo Matiz in Bogotá in 1951 brought him accolades in Colombia, he was a long way from achieving the international art stardom of his later years. His paintings from this decade seethe with energy, experimentation and expectation, much like, one can imagine, the ambitious artist himself at that time.
Buoyed by sales from his show at Leo Matiz as well as prize money for his winning submission to the Salón de Artistas Colombianos, Botero ventured to Europe in 1952 where he immersed himself in studying the Old Masters and 20th century modernists of Italy, Spain and France. Europe proved transformative for Botero, converting him into an insatiable student of art history. The lessons absorbed from wandering the Prado, Uffizi and Louvre in those early days would reverberate throughout his career. After Europe, Botero returned to Bogotá and then to Mexico City in 1956 where again he took to studying the masters, this time the muralists: Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. The monumental figures of Los Tres Grandes, as the trio became known, left another indelible impression on Botero that would prove a springboard for his lifelong investigation of volume and form.
Back home in Bogotá in the late 1950s, Botero set to work finding his own individual visual vocabulary that differentiated him from those eminent artistic predecessors. The body of work from this period is defined by vigorous brushstrokes, a deep, jewel-toned palette and an air of mystery. While markedly different from the paintings produced in the later six decades of his career, his 1950s work reveal the artist grappling with what would become the most significant principle of his practice—how to articulate volume and form.
Pushed up against the picture plane, the girl in the present painting takes on monumental proportions, the hallmark of Botero’s now immediately recognizable style. Her bulbous facial features and considerable coif of black hair foreshadow the voluptuous figures from the artist’s later years. The expressionistic brushstrokes rendered in intense shades of aquamarine, rose and black, sharply deviate, however, from Botero’s later polished style that masks the hand of the artist. There is also an experimental and enigmatic essence here that Botero later eschewed. The surface of the painting toggles between thickly applied impasto and passages of canvas left deliberately bare. Rather than the clearly defined narratives found in the paintings of the artist’s later years, here the subject is more inscrutable. Botero provides a minimal plot line—a girl holding flowers, the likes of which we have never seen—and leaves us to ask more questions: What are these flowers? Who is this girl? What is she thinking? Who is this artist? Who will he become?
Buoyed by sales from his show at Leo Matiz as well as prize money for his winning submission to the Salón de Artistas Colombianos, Botero ventured to Europe in 1952 where he immersed himself in studying the Old Masters and 20th century modernists of Italy, Spain and France. Europe proved transformative for Botero, converting him into an insatiable student of art history. The lessons absorbed from wandering the Prado, Uffizi and Louvre in those early days would reverberate throughout his career. After Europe, Botero returned to Bogotá and then to Mexico City in 1956 where again he took to studying the masters, this time the muralists: Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. The monumental figures of Los Tres Grandes, as the trio became known, left another indelible impression on Botero that would prove a springboard for his lifelong investigation of volume and form.
Back home in Bogotá in the late 1950s, Botero set to work finding his own individual visual vocabulary that differentiated him from those eminent artistic predecessors. The body of work from this period is defined by vigorous brushstrokes, a deep, jewel-toned palette and an air of mystery. While markedly different from the paintings produced in the later six decades of his career, his 1950s work reveal the artist grappling with what would become the most significant principle of his practice—how to articulate volume and form.
Pushed up against the picture plane, the girl in the present painting takes on monumental proportions, the hallmark of Botero’s now immediately recognizable style. Her bulbous facial features and considerable coif of black hair foreshadow the voluptuous figures from the artist’s later years. The expressionistic brushstrokes rendered in intense shades of aquamarine, rose and black, sharply deviate, however, from Botero’s later polished style that masks the hand of the artist. There is also an experimental and enigmatic essence here that Botero later eschewed. The surface of the painting toggles between thickly applied impasto and passages of canvas left deliberately bare. Rather than the clearly defined narratives found in the paintings of the artist’s later years, here the subject is more inscrutable. Botero provides a minimal plot line—a girl holding flowers, the likes of which we have never seen—and leaves us to ask more questions: What are these flowers? Who is this girl? What is she thinking? Who is this artist? Who will he become?