Informed by art historical influences ranging from Italian Renaissance and Dutch Golden Age Masters to the French Impressionists and even his New York School contemporaries, Fernando Botero has achieved a uniquely personal solution to bring figurative painting into the twentieth century: one that embraces both sharp societal critique and a sly sense of humor. Born to humble beginnings in the countryside near Medellin, Colombia in 1932, Botero’s artistic ambition (and a scholarship) took him to the prestigious Academia San Fernando in Madrid in 1952, where he funded his years of study and travel to Europe’s great museums by selling copies of Velazquez and Titian’s masterpieces to tourists, executed over painstaking hours of observation in the Prado. Successful exhibitions in Bogota, Mexico City and eventually Washington, D.C. led the artist to settle briefly in New York beginning in late 1959. In that critical year, he began to execute a series of reinterpretations of the most famous paintings of the Western canon, including the Mona Lisa - one of which was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York (and was the only figurative work acquired by the museum that year). Of that work, Mona Lisa Age 12 (see fig. 1), Botero wrote:

Later, he reflected - “without knowing it it was a little like the philosophy of Pop Art. Another thing I found was important was that - with a bold approach - the head is so overblown that it takes up the entire space. I’m not saying that I created this in American art but I wasn’t taking it from American artists.” (Fernando Botero, quoted in Exh. Cat., Washington, D.C., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Fernando Botero, 1979, p. 15) While the early series to which El Taller de Vermeer belongs was executed prior to Botero’s knowledge of Pop Art, these works emerge from the same American zeitgeist, a shared impulse to reflect on the psychological impact of mass-produced images on Western culture in an era of rapid globalization.

Where the Mona Lisas of 1959-60 offer an examination of the function of one specific iconic image, El Taller de Vermeer offers a complex reflection on artistic authorship and authenticity. Vermeer’s famed Girl with a Pearl Earring (see fig. 2) appears twice in this work - once in the form of a collaged image of the actual Dutch master painting, and then again in larger form as the composition’s primary (painted) subject, posed as if to model for a painter who is out of frame. Botero applies layers of echoing fiction and winking humor here, in a gesture whose profundity belies the whimsy with which it is rendered; the painting that is “real” in the world of the viewer is fictive in the world of this painting, and the model, the “real” subject, is a fabrication whose gown and elbows spill tantalizingly out of the frame. An intentional pentimento, where the figure’s famously adorned ear has been moved slightly to the right, further reveals the artifice inherent to painting - and introduces a warm, Boterian charm to Vermeer’s unblemished, otherworldly sitter.

A technical tour-de-force rendered in luscious, rich earth tones in the vibrational, painterly style that characterizes Botero’s best output of the early 1960s, El Taller de Vermeer can be understood to dialogue not only with art history, but with a more specific lineage of “fiercely loony American figure painting—Willem de Kooning’s grinning women…and the recent and updated resurgence of that tradition in the work of John Currin, Glenn Brown, Dana Schutz, and others” (Holland Cotter, “A Mind Where Picasso Meets Looney Tunes,” New York Times, 27 January 2011, n.p.). Through the effects of both volumetric distortion and conceptual framing, Botero leads the viewer to a new understanding of the relationship between painting and looking in a manner that parallels de Kooning’s achievement in his iconic Women (see fig. 3). Presenting an image of Vermeer’s enigmatic model in a thoroughly Boterian world, where rotund apples seem ready to topple out of the picture plane and the figure meets our gaze with delightful impishness, Botero inserts himself into the Dutch Master’s place - and thus into the Western canon.