El poeta

Botero long worked within the venerable canons of art history, with what he once called a “very strange mixture of admiration and criticism.” Acknowledging that “an artist is always a critic of earlier artists,” he explained, “You think you must, and can, improve on earlier ages,” but at the same time “you must have this critical attitude to art of the past... You can take the same subject and create a totally different painting. That’s where real originality lies, in taking something that’s already been done by someone and doing it differently” (in W. Spies, “‘I’m the most Colombian of Colombian artists’: A Conversation with Fernando Botero,” Fernando Botero: Paintings and Drawings, Munich, 1992, pp. 155-56). Since first departing for Europe in 1952, Botero drew from and critically reinterpreted myriad art-historical sources—Titian and Velázquez; Giotto and Masaccio; Rubens and Ingres—and embraced the classical sensuality of volume, space, and color in legions of stylized “Boteromorphs.” In El poeta Botero revisited an early and enduring source—Édouard Manet—in a delightful meditation on the genre of pastoral scenes, the stakes of modernism, and the art of homage.

Botero persistently engaged with Manet’s iconoclastic painting, Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe (1863), which scandalized contemporary audiences with its frank depiction of working-class sexuality and its non-illusionistic flatness, both of which defied classicizing Renaissance values. Beginning with Picnic in the Mountains (1966) and continuing in “Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe” (1969) and El poeta, among other works, Botero reimagined the scene, “remak[ing] Manet’s even balance between landscape and figures,” as critic Carter Ratcliff explains. “They completely Botero-ize all there is of tradition in Manet’s style.” Manet had himself upended academic tradition, riffing on historical exemplars—notably, Titian’s Concert Champêtre (c. 1509) and Marcantonio Raimondi’s engraving after Raphael’s The Judgement of Paris (c. 1510-20). Botero turned the tables a century later, “Botero-iz[ing] Manet’s homage to the Renaissance” in his own revisitation of the Old Masters and the subsequent development of his eponymous style. “The massive weight of Boteromorphic plasticity expunges all hints of modernist formal play from pictorial space,” Ratcliff continues. “The unity of this painting requires Botero’s style to stand at a border and look two ways at once—toward Raphael’s Renaissance and toward the twentieth-century modernism which Manet did so much to instigate” (Botero, New York, 1980, pp. 117-23).

The dapper gentleman portrayed in El poeta nods to his modernist predecessor in Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, but in Botero’s revisioning he projects a benign, verdant serenity as reclines against a grove of apple trees. In the present painting as well as an earlier Poet (1970), Botero monumentalizes his subject, his pillowy body—jauntily dressed in a three-piece suit that clings to his curves—at rest as he takes a break from his poetic musings. A notepad rests alongside his right forearm just to the side of a bright red pencil, which floats at the edge of the canvas in a subtle homage to the age-old trompe-l’oeil tradition. The apples, a recurrent motif across Botero’s paintings, suggestively transport the figure to a modern-day Garden of Eden—a snake similarly appears in his “Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe”—and in that way return the painting to a timeless and eternal subject. “An artist is able to let people experience the past with the feeling of the present,” Botero reflected. “You can’t escape from your own time, so you’re creating something that belongs to the present moment—because once art has gone through an experience it never returns to its previous position. That’s why it’s impossible to fake Quattrocento or nineteenth-century paintings—they’ll always be twentieth-century paintings” (in W. Spies, op. cit., p. 155).

Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park