Nice Round Figures

In fact, Botero knows tragedy firsthand, provided by both his country and his family life. Colombians call their most famous artist El Maestro, and he returns their affection. He's donated hundreds of his paintings and sculptures to museums in Bogotá and Medellín, as well as his entire personal collection of modern art, including works by Chagall, Matisse, Picasso and others he has purchased over the years. "As soon as [the donations] were made official, my father would walk through the streets and people would throw themselves at him," says his son, Juan Carlos Botero Zea, 44, a novelist who moved to Miami five years ago.

But the artist's fame also makes him and his family prime targets for kidnapping. Botero slips into Colombia for brief visits about three times a year, traveling in an armored car with bodyguards provided by the government. In 1993, gangsters came to Botero's house in Colombia looking for him; he was not at home at the time. "When you come from a family with a prominent man like my father, you don't survive a kidnapping," says Juan Carlos.

Increasingly distressed about Colombia's drug wars, Botero has created more than 50 works on the violence, including a painting of druglord Pablo Escobar's 1993 death in a hail of bullets on a Medellín rooftop. Botero regards [an error occurred while processing this directive] these works as some of his most meaningful, and has donated them to the National Museum in Bogotá. Those paintings also draw criticism, however. "Most people said it was glorifying violence," he says.

In 1995, Colombia's murky mixture of politics and gangsterism claimed a new victim: Botero's relationship with his eldest son, Fernando Botero Zea, a Harvard-educated politician who was Colombia's Defense Minister and a possible presidential contender. He was arrested on charges of accepting campaign funds for President Ernesto Samper from druglords and later convicted, spending nearly three years in jail. Devastated, Botero visited his son in jail only once, and then refused to talk to him for "three or four years," says the artist.Botero's darkest hour came years earlier, in 1974, with the death of his son, Pedro, whom he calls Pedrito. The Antioquia Museum in Medellín contains a room dedicated to Pedro, who was killed at the age of 4 when a truck rammed into Botero's car in Spain during a family vacation. Juan Carlos recalls his father shut in his Paris studio for weeks after the accident, inconsolable. Even now, 31 years on, Botero can hardly bear to discuss his loss. Botero says the tragedy destroyed his relationship with Pedro's mother — he is now married to the Greek sculptor Sophia Vari — and drove him into a depression, alleviated only by his incessant painting, including several portraits of Pedro. "Several times in my life I have reconstructed my life through painting," Botero says. "That is why painting is so sacred to me. It saves me in my worst moments."

And that is why he describes the life he now lives as the happiest possible, working at a pace some would consider relentless. For him it's a joyful release. "I have so much pressure to work," says Botero. "I haven't found anything that amuses me more. And at my age, you have to enjoy life.