This essay was written by the historian and political thinker Germán Arciniegas for the deluxe edition of the book on Fernando Botero produced by the Edilerner publishing house (1970). This essay is the text for the book, which focuses mainly on the visual aspect of the artist’s work. In other words, this essay functions as a support for the reproductions; it narrates in historic prose, the artist’s circumstances and career prior to mastering the “imaginative nature” of his signature style. Arciniegas refers to the cities where Botero lived, each of which influenced the latter’s artistic development: Tolú, Bogotá, Barcelona, Paris, Madrid, Florence, Mexico City, and New York. According to Arciniegas, that early career had an important influence on Botero’s art, although he established his reputation as an artist when he was in the United States. The essay describes the grotesque nature of Botero’s paintings, which was a salient feature of his work, as: “picturesque” and “satirical,” imbued with “an exquisitely ridiculous and schmaltzy quality,” with “mocking commentary, and muted sarcasm.”

In this brief essay, Germán Arciniegas (1900–1999) outlines the life and work of Fernando Botero (b. 1932), and traces the genealogy of his style. The roots of Botero’s art go back to the illustrations he contributed to magazines and newspapers during his youth, and to an essay that was described as sinful by the priests at his school; he was called “Picasso!” Arciniegas, speaking as a critic, praises the “definitively defined” aspect of Botero’s paintings, as well as his reclaiming of traditional values in his pictorial rhetoric: the portrait, the figure, the copy (or version of the subject of a traditional work), and local and provincial, and popular and institutional themes. He stresses that the painter’s success was due to his fruitful development of a method and a technique.  

It is surprising to read that according to this historian and political thinker’s research, Botero’s resounding success was determined by the eventual acceptance of the critics, after many rejections. His breakthrough came when the Museum of Modern Art in New York bought his version of the Mona Lisa. At that point, Botero became a national hero; his art had suddenly become a lucrative commodity. In some cases in Latin America, an artist’s exposure and acknowledgment are determined by the quorum of publishers, galleries, museums, and the most prestigious magazines in the world, which still control and define the products that circulate in the art market, thus prolonging their monopolies of the culture. Arciniegas applauds the “imaginative nature” of Botero’s unique style, the “prodigious trick” that he uses to encode all his works and that has defined him as an artist. The trick, according to Arciniegas, is “a simple alteration of measurements” that endows the figures in his paintings with “disproportion.” To what extent did that discovery and the honing of a technique become an infinitesimally boring formula for the potential of the portrait?     

Germán Arciniegas, a virtually unknown author, was nonetheless one of the most luminous Colombian essayists of the twentieth century; he wielded a literary, provocative, lucid, and iconoclastic pen. His obsession (as a sociologist and historian) was the Americas, to which he devoted most of his writing in an attempt to understand them. He was prominently and prolifically engaged in the field of education and culture in Colombia, where he held government positions, and worked as a journalist, a university professor, and as a founder and editor of several important magazines.