Paintings of Abu Ghraib- Fernando Botero "driven" to paint depictions of the horror

[n2doc]

snip:

I asked him to explain how the Abu Ghraib series began.

"The whole world and myself were very shocked that the Americans were torturing prisoners in the same prison as the tyrant they came to remove," he said. "The United States presents itself as a defender of human rights and of course as an artist I was very shocked with this and angry. The more I read, the more I was motivated. ... I think Seymour Hersh's article was the first one I read. I was on a plane and I took a pencil and paper and started drawing. Then I got to my studio and continued with oil paintings. I studied all the material I could. It didn't make sense to copy, I was just trying to visualize what was really happening there."

In all, he produced 87 drawings and paintings on the subject.

His New York gallery, which presented the Abu Ghraib work for the first time in the United States, received some hate mail for its trouble, some visitors evidently perceiving the work as anti-American.

"Anti-American it's not," Botero said emphatically. "Anti-brutality, anti-inhumanity, yes. I follow politics very closely. I read several newspapers every day. And I have a great admiration for this country. I'm sure the vast majority of people here don't approve of this. And the American press is the one that told the world this is going on. You have freedom of the press that makes such a thing possible."

No one can accuse Botero of trying to profit from his Abu Ghraib pictures, at least not directly.

"They are absolutely not for sale," he said.

Instead, he has offered to give them to any museum that will commit to keeping some of them on view at all times. Perhaps that, as much as their content, has led to occasional imputations of anti-American sentiments.

"I already have an offer from Germany," Botero said, "from the Kunsthalle Würth, near Stuttgart. But I think they should be here" -- in the United States -- "or in Baghdad. My hope is that they will not disappear into some museum's storage."

Botero plainly could not refrain from the outcry his Abu Ghraib series makes against the breach of human rights. But what does he think his work accomplishes that the infamous photographs do not?

"Art is important in time," he said. "It brings some kind of reflection to the matter. We have analyzed this thing from editorial pages and books, but somehow this vision by an artist completes what happened. He can make visible what's invisible, what cannot be photographed. In a photo, you just do a click, but in art you have to put in so much energy. This concentration of energy and attention says something that other media cannot say."

Call it faith in painting. Most painters I know voice it in some terms.

But once a painter ventures into territory as painful as making torture a pictorial theme, how does he know when to stop?

"One day, I didn't have anything more to say," Botero said. "You feel kind of empty and kind of quiet. You've taken out all your anger and your frustration."

What remains is the conviction of having done a right and necessary thing.

"Art is important," Botero said, "because when people start to forget, art reminds them what happened. Like 'Guernica.' People would not remember the tragedy of Guernica today if it were not for that painting."

Recalling the circumstances of Picasso's frenzied production of his great anti-war statement -- an interlude between portraits of his lover at the time, Dora Maar -- Botero described his own year-and-a-half obsession with Abu Ghraib as "a parenthesis."

"There are always the eternal subjects of painting and then there's something that takes you out of that. It is not the first time I did this. In the '60s I did many satirical portraits of dictators. In 2000 I did a series of paintings about the tragedy of my country" -- its struggles with governance and drug-lord gangsterism. "I donated them to the National Museum in Bogota."

Art Services International in Washington has organized a retrospective of Botero's work that opened last week in Quebec City, Canada, and will travel to eight cities in the United States, including Sacramento.

But when ASI shopped the Abu Ghraib series around to various American museums as a possible exhibition, it got no takers.

"That's why we had the gallery show in New York City," Botero said.

"The invitation to Berkeley was extremely important," he said.

Partly as a consequence of Berkeley's interest, the Katzen Arts Center at American University in Washington will show the entire Abu Ghraib series later this year.

Full article:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/01/29/DDGF2NPRO91.DTL

[maxsolomon]

1. Leon Golub

glad to see Botero joining up with Leon.

[librechik]

2. Wow. Botero style.

Thank you, maestro.