To be synonymous, as an artist, with a particular visual style — as Fernando Botero is — seems increasingly odd in the early 21st century. Today, we think it natural for artists to explore different visual languages, perhaps working across media and in divergent forms during a single career. To be recognizable — in Botero's case, for depicting figures with a roundness often characterized as pneumatic or inflatable — comes perilously close to advancing a visual brand (and servicing the market). Despite financial reward, the artist who follows this model eventually acquires an association with commercialism that turns admiration into knowing condescension among the community of contemporary art appreciators.
The Baroque World of Fernando Botero, currently on view at the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, offers precisely this: Brand Botero — a retrospective buffet of oversized pictures featuring the artist's trademark fatties. In fairness to Botero, his complexity significantly outstrips this particular presentation. If I had my druthers, the museum's Hazel Hough Wing galleries, into which his paintings and bronze sculptures have been awkwardly crowded, would be stripped and sparsely re-installed with only the artist's recent renditions of prisoners at Abu Ghraib locked in the convolutions of sexually humiliating torture (with maybe a director's tour and a probing discussion of the American cultural and political unconscious).
However, Baroque World is not so intriguing a show. Even the Botero paintings at the MFA that seem to want to punch you in the teeth — a goal that any artist worth the name should have somewhere in the back of her mind — are presented, as if neutered, in the context of his "baroqueness." The curators focus on Botero's so-called discovery of inflated figuration and suggest that historic painting was an influence on his work. But if that's all there is, the work seems no more than postmodern pastiche of the least interesting kind; Botero's more disturbing complexities are muted. For example, "20.15 Hours (Massacre)" is a 2004 tableau that depicts a brutal, politically motivated killing. Regarded as just another image in a parade of inflated bodies, the painting can be comfortably consumed by viewers as something to ogle (a horror, to be sure, but one that takes far away in in the fanciful elsewhere of Colombia, Botero's native country).
Likewise downplayed is the troubling mix of eroticism, morbidity and debased humor that combine in a painting like "Woman Falling from a Balcony" (1994), which suggests a prostitute meeting her untimely end. Despite its hilariously overt symbolism (a plate of chorizo and two potatoes, anyone?) "The Picnic" (1989) is grouped with still lifes as if a split-open papaya were just that.
In the work that enjoys more prominence in the installation, Botero's pneumatic figuration takes on the quality of schlock. There's "Dancer at the Barre" (2001), one leg of her zaftig body improbably lifted to expose her crotch. Or, "The Bath" (1989), with its naked and vast-buttocked female protagonist — punctuated on the rear by a black mole — gazing into a mirror. What tentative familial exchanges will take place in front of these pictures — gee, honey, Botero really has a talent for painting the figure — I can only imagine.
One the exhibition's strange treats is the inclusion of several canvases from Botero's early exploration of abstraction in the 1950s and '60s. Less gassy and more art brut, these paintings of childish figures emerging from a thicket of brushstrokes are at least as interesting as anything else on view. Though their function in the retrospective is to trace a populist progression from abstraction to clearly identifiable figures, they do what the rest of the show cannot do — which is to hint at a picture of Botero as a complex and captivating artist.
This article appears in Feb 24 – Mar 2, 2010.