Arts Listings

In his interview with Robert Hass to an overflowing crowd at International House, the Columbian artist Fernando Botero mentioned that when reading Seymour Hersh’s article in The New Yorker about American soldiers using torture in the same prison at Abu Ghraib where Saddam Hussein used similar violent tactics, he was deeply shocked. 

This, he had not expected of the North Americans. Compelled to respond to this outrage with pencil and brush, he spent the next 14 months creating over a hundred drawings and paintings, based on the photographs which had been published showing the humiliation, abuse, depravity and torture. 

Botero, Latin America’s most celebrated artist, has been known for his whimsical, lighthearted pneumatic figures. Retaining aspects of his personal style, he now addressed issues of deep human concern. The victims in the paintings, currently on view at Doe Library are still volumetric and refer to the Renaissance tradition. 

Botero, growing up in rural Colombia, went first to Mexico and was indelibly impressed by the by the murals of Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros which used modern syntax for an art that would speak to the people. Botero went on to Paris, but was drawn to Florence. It was the Florentine Renaissance painters—Giotto, Massacio, Piero della Francesca, Michelangelo, who gave volume and flesh to the human body and who conveyed space in artistic terms. The large bodies in the Abu Ghraib series occupy this Renaissance space. The grid of the cell bars in many of the paintings give clear structure to the compositions. 

But we have to look for precedent of these powerful works beyond the formal aspects. They relate to all the paintings of tortured martyrs and, above all, to the pictures of the Crucifixion. In later art they reiterate the horrific paintings and etchings by Goya, especially the bleeding corpses and severed limbs in his “Disasters of War.” And, of course Picasso, whose painting of “Guernica” has eternalized and universalized the first bombing from the air of the small Basque town. “Art is permanent accusation,” Botero said.  

Close to our own time Leon Golub’s “Mercenaries” of the 1980s, relating America’s covert operations in Latin America come to mind. Whereas Golub focused on the perpetrators, Botero spares us the well known images of Pfc England leading naked prisoners on a dog’s leash. We must remember that, while these uneducated soldiers were court-martialled, the initiators of the torture program were never touched. Indeed, Alberto Gonzales, who probably was in charge of the program, was rewarded by the “Decider” who appointed him attorney general of the United States. The banality of evil is only too apparent. 

Botero shows us the degradation, the pain and suffering of the prisoners. They are blindfolded while pain is inflicted on their persons. Nakedness is great humiliation to Muslims. Here they are made to wear brassieres and pink panties. The torturers are indicated by green gloves and heavy boots or the stream of piss directed at the helpless bodies. Sado-massochistic acts as well as forced homosexual ones are displayed. And there are the grey-green hellhounds, staring at the victims, bearing their razor-sharp teeth as they brutally attack the defenseless naked victims. 

The exhibition at Doe Library on the Berkeley Campus was organized by the Center for Latin American Studies, which transformed a computer room into a fine exhibition space in record time. The exhibition was offered to the Berkeley Art Museum, which did not have the space, the time slot or the inclination to mount this exhibition, which is without doubt the most controversial and important show seen hereabouts in many years.