Fernando Botero, Artist of Whimsical Rotundity, Is Dead at 91

Fernando Botero, the Colombian whose voluptuous photos and sculptures of overstuffed generals, bishops, prostitutes, housewives and different merchandise of his magical-realist creativeness made him one of many world’s best-known artists, died on Friday in Monaco. He was 91.

His dying, in a hospital, was confirmed by a detailed good friend, Mauricio Vallejo, a co-owner of an artwork gallery in Houston, who stated the trigger was problems of pneumonia. President Gustavo Petro of Colombia earlier introduced the dying on social media.

As a younger artist, Mr. Botero developed an immediately recognizable fashion and loved nice and speedy industrial success. Fans sought his autograph and had been recognized to attend for him at airports.

“‘It’s the profession you do if you wish to die of hunger,’ people used to tell me,” he as soon as recalled. “Yet I was so strongly impelled to take it up that I never thought about the consequences.”

Mr. Botero was completely related to the florid, rounded figures that crammed his photos. He portrayed middle-class life and bordellos, clerics and peasants, bulging baskets of fruit and the grim results of violence.

Fernando Botero Angulo was born on April 19, 1932, within the Colombian metropolis of Medellín. His father died when he was a toddler. An uncle enrolled him in a Jesuit highschool, inspired his inventive pursuits and supported him for 2 years as he studied to be a matador. Bullfighting scenes determine in a few of his earliest work, and he adopted bullfighting all his life.

After publishing an article titled “Pablo Picasso and Nonconformity in Art,” Mr. Botero was expelled from his Jesuit college as a result of it expressed concepts stated to be “irreligious.” Among his early influences had been Cubism, Mexican murals and the pinup artwork of Alberto Vargas, whose “Vargas girl” drawings he noticed in Esquire journal.

He started publishing illustrations in a neighborhood newspaper whereas nonetheless a young person, labored as a set designer and in 1951 moved to Bogotá, the capital. After his first one-man present there, he moved to Paris and spent a number of years residing there and in Florence, Italy.

In 1961, the New York curator Dorothy Miller purchased a Botero work, “Mona Lisa, Age Twelve,” for the Museum of Modern Art. It was a stunning selection, since Abstract Expressionism was then the craze, and Mr. Botero’s sketchy portrait of a chubby-cheeked little one appeared misplaced. It was positioned on exhibit whereas the unique Mona Lisa was being proven uptown, on the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Modern’s consideration to his work helped set Mr. Botero on a path to renown. In 1979, he was the topic of a retrospective on the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington. Many of his photos had been of corpulent figures poised between caricature and pathos.

“A perfect woman in art can prove banal in reality, like a photograph in Playboy,” Mr. Botero reasoned. “The most beautiful women in art, like Mona Lisa herself, were ugly in real life. There are those who see the monstrous in my work, but my work is what it is.”

One evaluate of the Hirschhorn present was headlined “Botero, One Hundred Thousand Dollars for a Painting by Him in Washington.” That mirrored the view of some critics that Mr. Botero’s work was banal, self-referential and out of contact with vibrant currents in up to date artwork.

“The critics have always written with rage and fury about me, all my life,” Mr. Botero groused.

Writing in The London Evening Standard in 2009, the humanities author Godfrey Barker marveled, “Wow, do they loathe him.”

“The high priests of contemporary art in London and New York cannot stand him because he defies everything they believe in,” Mr. Barker wrote. “They hate him more because he is rich, an immense commercial success, easy on the eye, and very popular with ordinary folk.”

Mr. Botero and his first spouse, Gloria Zea, who grew to become Colombia’s minister of tradition, divorced in 1960 after having three kids: Fernando, Lina, and Juan Carlos. He spent a lot of the subsequent decade and a half residing in New York. Ms. Zea died in 2019. He was married two different occasions, 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 kids from his first marriage in addition to a brother, Rodrigo, and grandchildren.

Two misfortunes marked Mr. Botero’s household life. In the Nineteen Seventies, his 5-year-old son, Pedro, from his second marriage, was killed in a automobile crash through which Mr. Botero was injured. His son Fernando Botero Zea, who had develop into a politician in Colombia and rose to minister of protection, served 30 months in jail after being convicted in a corruption scandal.

It was throughout the Nineteen Seventies that Mr. Botero’s curiosity in type led him to sculpture. His sculptures, many depicting florid, whimsical massive individuals, introduced him a brand new degree of public visibility. Major cities clamored to position them alongside predominant avenues, together with, in New York, within the median strips of Park Avenue in 1993. Several are on everlasting show in nontraditional areas starting from the foyer of the Deutsche Bank Center (previously the Time Warner Center) in New York to a lounge on the Grand Wailea resort in Hawaii known as the Botero Bar.

Mr. Botero was an enthusiastic artwork collector, and in 2000 he donated a part of his assortment to a museum in his hometown, Medellín. Some of his works are interpretations of masterpieces by artists like Caravaggio, Titian and van Gogh.

Mr. Botero often depicted his males of energy with at the very least a contact of irony or satire. Yet, though they could seem foppish or self-important, and practically all are of exaggerated proportion, he infused them with a measure of dignity.

Jesus was Mr. Botero’s topic in a number of evocative works. He painted portraits of Delacroix, Ingres and Giacometti. His photos of authority, like “Cardinal,” “The English Ambassador,” “The First Lady” and two known as “The President,” painted in 1987 and 1989, are gently sympathetic. He introduced portly dignity to a person who smoked and a girl who stroked a cat.

Many of his topics, although, had been swollen tapestries of flesh, bursting from the confines of uniforms, attire and towels unable to cowl exaggerated acreage. He insisted that he by no means painted fats individuals, saying he wished merely to glorify the sensuality of life.

“I studied the art of Giotto and all other Italian masters,” he as soon as stated. “I was fascinated by their sense of volume and monumentality. Of course in modern art everything is exaggerated, so my voluminous figures also became exaggerated.”

Mr. Botero and Ms. Vari maintained properties in Paris and Pietrasanta, Italy, the place an exhibition was held to mark his eightieth birthday in 2012.

Some who thought of Mr. Botero’s artwork to be basically playful and lighthearted had been shocked when, in 2005, he produced a sequence of graphic work primarily based on images of prisoners abused on the American jail in Abu Ghraib, Iraq.

“These works are the result of the indignation that the violations in Iraq produced in me and the rest of the world,” he stated.

The New York Times artwork critic Roberta Smith wrote that the Abu Ghraib work “restore the prisoners’ dignity and humanity without diminishing their agony or the injustice of their situation.” The novelist and critic Erica Jong known as them “astonishing” and asserted that they argued for “a complete revision of whatever we previously thought of Botero’s work.”

“When we think about the Colombian artist Fernando Botero, most of us visualize his roly-poly people flaunting their fat, their fashionable headgear, their cigarettes and cigarette holders, their excess,” Ms. Jong wrote. “I never thought of these as political images until I saw Botero’s Abu Ghraib series.” Now, she added, “I see all Botero’s work as a record of the brutality of the haves against the have-nots.”

Mr. Botero had dealt with political themes before, notably the Colombian drug trade, but he always returned to more calming projects afterward. Following the Abu Ghraib series, he produced a series of circus pictures and then rediscovered his longtime love of still life.

“After all this time,” he said in 2010, “I always return to the simplest things.”

Ashley Shannon Wu contributed reporting.