Nice Round Figures

If you lived in New York City's Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, you might have encountered a tall, dapper Colombian among the hordes of aspiring artists who congregated there. Charming, garrulous and quick to make friends, he might have invited you to his tiny apartment and offered you one of his paintings for a few hundred dollars. He might even have confided that he desperately needed the money to pay the rent. If you stumped up the cash and took the painting home, you're one lucky investor. Works by Fernando Botero from that period are worth about $500,000 these days. "I sold my paintings myself to friends," Botero says. "They would come over after dinner. I was broke."

Talk about a reversal of fortune. Botero is now one of the world's richest and most successful artists. This week, a major retrospective, covering merely the last 15 of his 56 years' work, opens in Rome's Palazzo Venezia, showcasing 170 paintings, drawings and sculptures. The exhibition moves to the Würth Museum in Künzelsau, north of Stuttgart, Germany, in October and to Athens next summer, before heading to the U.S. in late 2006. The exhibition is sure to delight the many devotees of Botero's work, but it's certain to leave other art lovers nonplussed. Some critics regard his work as predictable and shallow — "popular" in the worst sense of the word. Botero admits that people relate more readily to his style than to more abstract or conceptual works, but is proud of that fact. "It communicates very easily with people," he says. So is Botero a great artist, or just a very, very successful one?

Botero's corpulent characters — comical but keenly observed renderings of rotund ballerinas, families and Latin American small-town types like the ladies in The Gardening Club (1997) — are instantly recognizable. Even acknowledged reproductions of his work sell for hundreds of dollars on eBay. Two years ago, the British magazine ArtReview compiled a Top 10 ranking of the most highly valued artists in terms of the total value of sales. Botero came out at No. 5, behind artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg but ahead of Dutch painter Karel Appel and Britain's David Hockney. The editors estimated that Botero's paintings and sculptures had sold over the years for more than $57 million. Although a big chunk of those profits went to collectors, millions have been made by the artist himself. Now 73, Botero says he's lost track of how much he's created: "I've painted every day of my life since I was 17," he says, sitting in his Paris studio one recent morning, the sun flooding the room through the skylight.

Despite, or perhaps because of, his success, Botero is curiously isolated from his peers. He prefers to surround himself with family and nonartist friends. Those artists he has befriended have been from an older generation, "where there was no jealousy," he says. More often, Botero says "it has been difficult to have relations with artists of my generation because I was doing the opposite." Yet most who meet Botero are struck by his huge charm and gregarious personality.

He trained in Europe in the 1950s, and never became part of the abstract or conceptual art movements, instead sticking to the voluminous figurative style he formed in his 20s. Botero says he first became fascinated with "bolometric" shapes while living in Florence in 1953, inspired by Old Masters like Giotto and Botticelli: "I saw that volume gives a sensuality to painting. People say, 'When are you going to do something different?' I say, maybe never. The day I change my convictions is the day I'll do something different. You have to be strong to just follow your convictions and do what you want to do."