Distinguished art historian Peter Selz, founding director emeritus of the UC Berkeley Art Museum, will discuss Botero’s Abu Ghraib paintings in this informal presentation.
Selz has a longstanding commitment to the art of social and political protest, which took form most recently in his landmark publication Art of Engagement: Visual Politics in California and Beyond. The book traces the confluence of political agitation and passionately engaged art from the mid-twentieth century through responses to September 11 and the war in Iraq, and gave rise to the exhibition Visual Politics: The Art of Engagement, presented at the San Jose Museum of Art and at American University Museum in Washington, D.C.
A longtime admirer of Botero, Selz will share his singular breadth and depth of perspective as it illuminates the various meanings of Botero’s art of protest.
Fernando Botero’s early interest in art was sparked by an exhibition of works by the famed Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Siqueiros; noting that “they made the reality of the country the subject of their art,” Botero saw in their paintings a “direct way of speaking.” As a young artist, Botero traveled to Europe to study the masters in Spain and Italy. Based in New York in the 1960s, later settling in Paris, Botero became known for lively compositions of volumetric, sensual figures. Yet his works also have often criticized military juntas and dictators as part of Latin American history and culture, as well as the violence and drug wars in Colombia. These works clearly show the influence of the Spanish master Francisco Goya, who mocked the royals and the Church of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Spain, and whose famous series Los Desastres de la Guerra (The Disasters of War) responded with outrage to the brutality of the Napoleonic invasions, through which the artist himself lived.
