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Size matters Botero’s canvases are remarkable for the girth of his subjects

Like Picasso, he too has a passion for bullfighting.His first known work, a water-colour, featured a bullfighter. Botero was born in impoverished conditions on April 19, 1932 in Medellín, city in the Colombian Andes.Over the years, he developed his own brand of painting plump men and women. Even his bright landscapes, still lifes and sculptures display ‘fat’ objects and figures.

“Like his fellow countryman, the novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Botero’s vision is nostalgic and sensual, revisiting the rustic Colombia of his youth, her fly-blown cantinas, her tumultuous bordellos,” writes Stephen Smith, Culture Correspondent, BBC Newsnight, whose 50-minute documentary titled “The Big, Fat Art of Fernando Botero” has recently been voted 4th most popular among the BBC World’s Best Documentaries Of The Year: 2007. “His canvases have been remarked on for the great girth of their female subjects. ‘Botero the painter of fat women’ is the artist’s own thumbnail sketch of himself. His corn-fed senoritas have helped to bring him heroic status in Latin America, as well as a healthy order-book.”

In the film, Smith travels with Botero to Columbia where he requires armed protection because of the constant threat of kidnap. “We went to the shuttered mansion outside Bogotá, which Botero hasn’t visited for eleven years.”

Providing a fascinating peek into the jet-setting life of one of the richest artists in the world. The once camera-shy artist let the BBC television crew into his studio, to be filmed painting for the first time as well as in the artist’s sculpture studios and workshops where mammoth pieces are planned and executed. Botero reveals his love and inexplicable sorrow for his son – a charismatic politician - who has been accused and implicated for connections with drug cartel.

Among other highlights is the exhibition of his paintings provoked by the abuse of inmates at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.One learns that the artist has no plans to sell the works because he does not want to profit from the pain of others.There are exhilarating scenes of bullfighting. “Botero was invited to the bullfights in Medellín, his hometown,” recalls Smith. “At first, he was reluctant to be seen by the crowd. But then a bullfighter offered the artist his montera, his hat, a symbolic way of dedicating his fight, his kill, to Botero. Like the rest of the spectators, we watched open-mouthed as the septuagenarian entered the ring to accept the montera and embrace the matador, heedless of the snorting bull a few short metres away. The aficionados threw flowers to the matador but their cries of ‘Maestro!’ were for another Colombian hero, welcomed home after all."

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