When Seville began to change, its familiar voice of streets and squares still spoke true, seeding the air with myths. A restless man, unable to capture the jewel of urban design in a single explanation, wandered through that era with questions that refused tidy answers.
The man hailed from Bogota, had seen half the world, and could paint the most luscious, the most challenging forms in the recent history of art that celebrated fullness of body, yet he faced a deep struggle to synthesize all those wonders into one clear vision.
Seville at that moment did not seem ready for Botero. The painter, who would pass away at ninety-one after years of scarcity, fear, and a preoccupation with mortality that touched his loved ones as they aged and left the scene too soon, stood as a strong yet shy figure. He often showed only part of his face, a goatee mirroring the portrait-like edge of the larger figures in his canvases, brows raised as if to greet a smiling Colombia.
Colombian artist Fernando Botero passed away at the age of 91
At that time, he stood as perhaps the most beloved, widely recognized, and even envied by rivals who could not forgive someone who appeared as he did, an artist who skewered life with boldness. He pursued a bold idea of oil on canvas as a way to honor those who carry extra weight, not as a disease but as a stage for honest, sometimes exuberant, expression. When weight increases, some say the body buckles, but he argued that health and joy can live in the mirrored streets and shop windows, inviting different dimensions of the soul to surface at their own pace, including pauses in growth that feel natural.
People grasped the message and many welcomed it. Yet there were voices trying to overturn the aesthetic rhythm Botero had established, a rhythm as exaggerated as the verses poets once wrote about the foods they enjoyed. It was a time when the figures that made him famous were already seen on streets in Madrid and beyond, and someone in that milieu devised a fraud that would stain his reputation and cast a shadow over his present with a sadness that would linger for years.
I recall the moment he spoke to me from the Ritz, explaining what was happening. Rumors suggested his work carried a blood motif, tied to rumors of illicit buyers and shadows of the art market. He denied such claims, but in those days, truth struggled to keep pace with rumor, spreading like a wildfire. The sadness of this deceit touched him deeply, especially because the deceit had struck in the very city he loved, Madrid.
That moment still remains vivid: the ache in his voice, the image of the tall, elegant man who carried big ideas with a youthful spirit, as if a student on the brink of a school suspension. He spoke to me in the Plaza de Colón, and the Ritz seemed to echo the tears of a man who had lost more than a few battles in a crowded room of whispers.
My acquaintance with Botero grew clearer as the Expo invited him to contribute a note about Seville through Marlborough gallery, a collaboration that would help define a new chapter for the city. The invitation felt weighty, almost ceremonial, because Seville already carried a sense of grandeur that stretched beyond its river and its history. The best seller in those moments felt possible, a testament to a city becoming, in part, because of a man who could see gravity in a smile and light in a heavy form. Jacinto Pellón joined him in shaping that sense of Seville, a vision that felt brighter than the salt in the Guadalquivir itself.
They offered him a brief box of lines to describe the vastness, the river, and the life of Seville. A moment of creative hesitation followed. If only it could be his confession of helplessness rather than a formal request, a confession that might find its own metaphor in the very paintings that defined his voice.
Then the renowned gallery, Botero and Gordillo with Francis Bacon as a guiding name, reached out to me because I stood as a friend and, at one point, a collaborator in Botero’s circle. Could I write? So I became the narrator of Sevilla, bearing Botero’s name in a handful of lines. He signed them, and the memory of that moment remains a quiet honor I will not forget.
He was a great artist, a generous man full of metaphor and laughter. Yet he bore the mark of a world that could be unforgiving, a world that kept writing its own endings even as he kept painting new beginnings. Death, in its own stark handwriting, joined the letters that he could no longer count or pronounce, a reminder that even the strongest voices eventually fall silent.