Off in a corner of Milan’s Piazza della Scala, a woman is gathering a crowd. She’s huge, and her naked bronze body seems to parody the notion of voluptuousness. Her name is Standing Woman, and people pose with her one after another. Women stand before her waiting for the photograph to be over, not quite at ease with the enormous breasts and vagina looming over them. Men pose beneath her gigantic ass, and many stroke a buttock for their keepsake shot. A few rub her crotch. The children in the piazza scamper about and ignore the statue. Something about the work—tall, fat, bronze—turns children into adults and adults into children.
This statue by Fernando Botero has been placed here to lure visitors to a nearby museum, where a retrospective of his recent work is on display. For forty years, Botero’s paintings and sculptures have been famous for their fat men and women—or so they look to most people. To Botero, they are simply inflated torsos, shapes made huge and bulbous to devour space and create calm. He’s insistent on this point and denies that his creations are fat people, even though that is how everyone knows them.
I have come here to see Botero’s most controversial work because it has not been widely displayed in America, and so I walk over to the museum and enter. Inside, the show opens on grace notes—a giant watermelon, a man and woman dancing. Colors smear the eye and the room feels warm and the shapes soft: the priests, lovers, the man out on the town, naked women, old women, seamstresses, even a suicide crashing down through the air with that huge Botero body and blank face. Clowns prance, a sword-swallower glides the blade down his throat, a big woman parades on a unicycle, an Amazon reclines on a tiger. There are homages to his heroes: Van Gogh’s passionate flowers swell and blaze out of the frame; Van Eyck’s classic fifteenth-century Arnolfini marriage has been converted into a Botero, its burgher couple looking out from huge bodies.
And then, six rooms in, I hit them: the paintings of Abu Ghraib.
The walls are white, the paintings presented like jewels, and then I go through a door and the walls turn gray and a naked man with a brown beard and black hood sits on the floor, his arms chained to the wall; three blindfolded men are bound, and blood flows from two while the third vomits; a fierce dog snarls near another blindfolded man’s face.
Botero’s famous figures are changed in the paintings and drawings in this room. The human beings are still huge, but now they are taut and muscular—as if, to express his anger and despair, he had to pluck the example of Michelangelo’s giant people on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. In the corner, a European couple stares at a small drawing of a writhing man, his hands and feet bound, his eyes likewise blindfolded. The only real note of color in the image is a yellow stream raining down on him. It is the piss of one of my fellow citizens.
I am standing in Milan looking at the images my country prefers not to see.
When the story of Abu Ghraib broke in The New Yorker, in May 2004, Fernando Botero was on an airplane reading investigative journalist Seymour Hersh’s exposé. He was in a relad state, crossing the Atlantic to Paris. It was part of Botero’s pattern of migration from one sanctuary to another—sometimes a Mexican resort, sometimes New York, then Paris, and finally back to his 200-year-old house in Pietrasanta, Tuscany. Each year he moves from country to country but really stays in the same place, one that exists only in his imagination, where flowers are beautiful, people are massive and almost always happy, and the sky seems forever blue.
Botero is 75 years old, and when he is not traveling, he paints eight hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. He has done eighty major sculptures and maybe 3,000 paintings. His distinctive figures—with their inflated bodies all sharing blank faces and brilliant colors—have made his artwork some of the most recognizable of any living artist on earth. (Just ask anyone if they have seen those paintings of fat people and their eyes will light up.) His art is so popular that it is widely pirated for posters and as a veneer on furniture, but he does nothing about this theft now because taking legal action would eat into the time for his work.
He does not need to work as much as he does; he has more money than he will ever need. In 2005, his creations were reported to be worth more than $57 million, and the prices keep going up. Lately, nouveau riche Chinese have been plopping his huge bronzes in their Shanghai galleries.
But Botero works so hard at painting his world of bright colors and smiling faces because by creating it, he gets to inhabit it. And as he flew across the ocean, Hersh’s story jolted him. Botero recognized something in the story that he’d spent most of his life putting out of his mind. And so he set down the magazine and began sketching, right there on the flight. When he got to Paris, he started painting. For nine months, he did nothing but obsess over Abu Ghraib, and eventually he produced eighty-two paintings and drawings. They were works of pain, humiliation, and grief.
When the images were finished, in 2005, nine North American museums were planning to host a touring Botero show. Botero says that he offered to include the Abu Ghraib works as part of it, but all of the museums declined to show them. In November 2006, when the Marlborough gallery in New York displayed the work, armed guards were hired, and visitors wrote hate notes in the gallery’s comment book, things like: "only favors Muslim hatred of the West!" "lying, anti-American propaganda!" and "Abu Ghraib was nothing like this!"
Botero has not lived in his native Colombia since 1959 and has spent more than a decade in the United States. He believes in America. It is in many ways his second home.
"In Africa or Latin America," he tells me when I meet him at his Pietrasanta villa, "you expect the worst. But you do not expect this from the most powerful country in the world. It is a scandal."
Botero says his Abu Ghraib paintings are not for sale, because he does not want to earn money from torture. He just wants them to be seen.
He never wants this to be forgotten. Or repeated.
Fernando Botero is born poor in Medellín in 1932 and then gets poorer. His father is a traveling salesman—there is a photograph of him aside a mule in the Andes peddling his wares. He dies when Botero is 4. His mother is a seamstress trying to feed three sons. The family struggles. Botero studies to be a bullfighter but leaves the school the first day the training entails facing a real bull. He attends a Catholic high school and is doing well until he publishes an essay in the national newspaper at age 17 on Picasso as a hero of art and freedom. The dean of the school calls a meeting of the students in the patio, denounces Botero—for celebrating a womanizing, Communist-leaning lapsed Catholic—and expels him.
It is 1948, the very beginning of La Violencia, the prolonged civil war that kills at least 200,000 in Colombia. People disappear, people are tortured, people are ecuted. The slaughter is done by the government, or the government’s opponents, or simply by criminals who enjoy the sanctuary created by a nationwide social breakdown. Botero decides to be an artist; he goes to Bogotá and teaches himself art. When he is 19, a friend tells him to go to Tolú, a coastal village of black fishermen where a man can live on almost nothing.
There Botero finds a thatched hut with a dirt floor that he shares with a fisherman and a schoolteacher. The tiny room runs him five bucks a month, but the ceiling is covered with vampire bats. The locals teach him to dangle the blades of a razor-sharp local grass in the doorway. In a week or so, the blood-seeking bats have been so bloodied that they move to safer quarters.
Botero has not held a single job except his art. He believes that a painter is a person who paints, period, and sometimes he goes hungry and sometimes he can afford food. He has never betrayed his vocation. In Tolú there is a small inn, and he paints the walls with images of princesses. He trades this work for food. In two or three months, he does maybe twenty paintings.
One day, he is bathing in the sea and he looks up at the beach.
"I saw two policemen with a pole on their shoulders," he remembers. "A bound man is hanging from the pole, screaming."
La Violencia has paid him a visit. He returns to his hut and paints the scene. A few months later, he enters the painting in a national competition and wins $7,000. He is 20.
For the next three years, he haunts Europe. He lives in rooms with no heat—in the winter he goes to bed with his gloves and overcoat on. He spends maybe a dollar a day on food. He is in Madrid, Paris, then Italy, and he spends his days copying the old masters in museums so that he can teach himself their tricks. The paintings he peddles to tourists for a pittance, anything so that he can buy a meal. Even at 75, he almost swoons when he remembers his first exposure to the great art of Europe. "You have to realize that in Colombia at that time, there were no museums with artists like that," he says. "In Madrid, I went to the Prado five times a week."
He is a curious person—one who loses his father early and struggles simply to survive, who is formed by a culture of violence and then earns his way out of Colombia by winning a national prize with a scene of torture. And after all this, he deliberately seeks out and creates a world of beauty and peace and people having good times in parks and beaches and circuses and bars. This is the Colombia Botero has never known, because it is the Colombia that has never existed. Like his contemporary Gabriel García Márquez, he enters a fantasy world so that the barbarism of real life becomes bearable. He sets out to create a visual world without pain.
The debate over torture art—whether it is proper to display such things, whether it denigrates pain to show it—seems quaint, especially since there continues to be national debate in Congress and on Op-Ed pages about the pros and cons of using torture, about whether simulated drowning is torture at all. But torture art is worth debating for the simple reason that so much of Western art—with its crucifixions and inquisitions—is drawn from human pain inflicted by others. Italy is studded with such art. All over the country, saints are shot full of arrows, men writhe in agony on crosses—centuries of butchery and blood and gore. It is difficult to escape visual references to the violation of the flesh; almost every woman you see wears a cross dangling from her neck.
But, of course, no one was trying to get Christ to give up his secrets—his suffering, as the story goes, was meant to link human fate to the divine realm, and so it was celebrated. In our modern world, torture is not like the passion of Christ; the physical pain it causes goes toward less spiritual ends. Modern torture is always about breaking a person, about destroying the mind and will, about stealing—not purifying—the soul.
There was a time when such degradations were widely cited as one of the reasons Saddam Hussein must be overthrown. In those olden times, I sat with Iraqi refugees in Indonesia and listened to them tell of their time in Saddam’s prisons. Some of the tales were about nails being driven into a man’s head. None of the men could proceed very far into their stories before they would begin to shudder and then fall silent for long moments.
The humiliations of torture often remain unspoken, but they are never fully hidden. I have sat in John McCain’s Senate office as he talked me through his five and a half years in the Hanoi Hilton—the beatings and the screams. I have waited in the office of a comandante in a Mexican police station while next door a man screamed at the top his lungs. We sat. The comandante spoke calmly as if nothing were happening. And I spoke calmly as if nothing were happening.
In a way, that is how modern torture operates. We do not remember it, make art from it. We go on with our lives as if it had never happened.
In 1956, Botero is living in Mexico City and painting a picture of a mandolin. One day he makes the sound hole in the instrument tiny, and in doing so, he realizes that the volume of the instrument has been expanded to a giant size. He feels a change, and years later he says that "painting that tiny hole was like walking through a door." He is suddenly on the other side. And on that side is the world we now call Botero, where people are gigantic and fill the frame of a painting, where flowers are huge and beautiful, where the countryside is beckoning and safe.
After the mandolin, Botero paints priests; he has a cardinal in a bathtub, he has huge men and women dancing, there are circuses and valleys lush with green and still lifes of huge fruits and flowers. He moves to New York and struggles in Greenwich Village, selling his art for food and rent. He is the man out of step with his times. The art world is deep into abstract painting, and Botero is playing with huge people populating a lush countryside. Willem de Kooning, a giant of abstract painting, has a Colombian girlfriend. The two artists hang out together, and from him Botero learns a vital trick: Always clean your brushes with Mr. Clean, something he has done ever since.
In 1961, there is a knock at the door and it is Dorothy Miller of the Museum of Modern Art. She was visiting someone else in his building who had told her she should take a look at the stuff done by this strange Colombian. Botero has a painting on the floor he’d done in Colombia of a young girl with a trademark giant head. When he’d first painted her, a cleaning lady was in his room and she’d said it looked like Mona Lisa, so he took note and reworked the smile and titled it Mona Lisa, Age 12. The painting has an unintended whiff of irony—the closest Botero has ever come to Pop Art. The next day, MoMA sends someone to box it and then it is displayed in the museum. They even interview Botero and hang some of his comments on the wall next to the painting.
For Botero it was that close. He thinks, What if I had been out at the store when Dorothy Miller knocked? What if I had a different painting out than Mona Lisa, Age 12? He pauses as he remembers that moment and sighs, because no matter how hard you work at art, you must face the terror of being lucky or unlucky.
By 1964 or ’65, Botero is lucky enough to never worry about money. He is hosted by Latin American presidents; he meets Che Guevara. He buys a tiny house on Long Island and spends four months a year there, painting without distractions. He simply lives as he always has lived: painting eight hours a day, seven days a week. In the early ’70s, he teaches himself sculpture. And by the early ’90s, he is everywhere, instantly recognizable, and maintains homes on three continents.
Today Botero is beloved—a cultured, calm man. He wears the round black glasses that are a uniform among European intellectuals. He reads widely and is immersed in the history of Western art, and his eyes sparkle when he thinks of the Quattrocento or of Velázquez or Goya. He is the man everyone wants to meet after work for that quiet drink at the café while the sun sets and the turmoil of life can be briefly set aside for the joys of music and painting and literature. But his work, those thousands of paintings, those huge statues, those messages from a soft and kindly world, are often dismissed with one word—sentimental.
One night, as we finish a three-hour dinner in Pietrasanta, with a small army of empty wine bottles glowing in the candlelight, he looks up and says, "The critics hate me, hate me."
And he is right.
The critics say that Botero’s art is sappy, petty, decorative. That it is art for those who know nothing about art—mere pretty pictures, commodities mass-produced by a man who never stops working, a man who thinks that all it takes to be a great artist is working hard enough. When Arthur C. Danto wrote about Botero’s Abu Ghraib series in The Nation, he summed up the critics’ appraisal like this: "Though transparently modern, Botero’s style is admired mainly by those outside the art world. Inside the art world, critic Rosalind Krauss spoke for many of us when she dismissed Botero as ’pathetic.’"
"In Milan," Botero says, "one of my statues was sprayed with graffiti, and the papers said, ’Who could blame the vandals?’"
More than thirty books have been written about him, but he says with some pain, "When the critics write about me, it is to kill me. They hate me because I was not made by them."
Which is why his Abu Ghraib work has caused a stir.
The art world has mostly fallen deaf and dumb in the face of Abu Ghraib, and suddenly, this guy they have despised shows up with nearly a hundred paintings and drawings that scream out that something shameful and terrible has happened, done by the people and the nation he admires.
The Abu Ghraib works do not spring from the photographs that exploded across the world in April 2004. There is no Lynndie England holding the leash of a collared man on the ground. Botero read the published reports and then imagined not how such things look but how such things feel. And how they feel not simply to the flesh but how they feel in that place all interrogators seek to infiltrate: the mind. In almost none of the images are U.S. personnel present; for Botero, it is the torture that matters, not the face of the man doing the torture.
Because in reality, no one learns who is doing the torture, just as until the photographs surfaced, no one was willing to admit the torture was being done. We, like Botero, prefer to inhabit another world. We finance a secret CIA air force that whisks people off to secret black sites, but we do not know who the people snatched are, we don’t know if there is anything they actually know or can contribute to our war against terror, and we don’t really know who orders the abductions, beatings, and killings in our name. In our museums, we want the giant people sitting in the park, the fat naked women standing in the bathroom. We’ll pass on Iraqis with broomsticks up their asses.
In a way, Botero agrees with us. After all, he fled his homeland of violence to create an imaginary homeland—safe, until we came knocking at the door with our suitcase full of black sites.
There is something clean and refreshing about seeing a man of 75 who sells million-dollar bronze statues to rich men in China roll into the piazza on a motor scooter and then walk over to a small café to sit at an outside table and have his evening Campari with orange juice. Rain sprinkles the stone just before Botero arrives at the Café Teatro. He is buoyant from today’s eight hours of thinking of nothing but color and composition and harmony. Since he finished his Abu Ghraib series, he has gone to the circus in his mind, and now there are forty canvases of midgets, clowns, and trapeze artists, of the gaiety that comes to town when the big top is raised.
"You do things like the Abu Ghraib paintings as a Testimony," Botero says. "You don’t think you will change things. You want it to stay in the mind as something very wrong. There are things that have to be seen."
But mention of Abu Ghraib makes him suddenly somber, as he says things like "Art is a permanent accusation." He asks out loud if anyone would remember the bombing of civilians at Guernica, during the Spanish civil war, if Picasso had not made his famous painting.
"All of my life, I have thought about dictators and military juntas," he says. "But torture is something refined and cruel and done in cold blood. It is worse than violence."
He says, "You do things like the Abu Ghraib paintings as a testimony. You don’t think you will change things. You want it to stay in the mind as something very wrong. There are things that have to be seen."
When he says the words "very wrong," his hands stop moving and his voice has that pain of a small child who is shocked and hurt. But then he returns to being Botero, the person who at age 18 decided he would do no work but art.
I look across the table at him, where now he is lost in his love of Velázquez and Goya and Picasso and Van Gogh, and his face is smooth and ageless as he revels in this long line of artists he wishes to join, a cavalcade where humans paint and create beauty and joy.
This winter, Botero’s paintings were displayed at the University of California at Berkeley, where they were seen by 15,000 people. This month, they make a visit to American University, in the capital city of the United States. I am sure that when they are in Washington, some of my fellow citizens will denounce them as anti-American or as things that should never be on exhibit. As for me, I hear the man screaming in the next room while the comandante and I speak calmly as if nothing is happening.
I am the man who loves his country and must face the brutal truths of that love.
Fernando Botero is the man who believes in America.
CHARLES BOWDEN is a GQ correspondent.