FERNANDO BOTERO

(B. 1932)

La Casa de Rosalba Correa
2001

Footnotes

Provenance
Collection of the artist, Europe
Private Collection, Turkey (acquired from the above in 2013)
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner



Executed in Fernando Botero's distinctively voluptuous signature style, La Casa de Rosalba Correa from 2001 is a magnificently complex and distinctive painting by one of the most important Colombian modern artists of our day. Having studied under Roberto Longhi, a renowned authority on Italian Renaissance and Baroque art, Botero obtained a remarkable art historical knowledge of Western Classicism that transfuses his work. The canon of art history, especially the European one became a rich source of inspiration whilst studying Italy's Renaissance frescoes, Spain's Golden Age masters and France's turn-of-the-century School of Paris on his travels in the 1950's. Profoundly influenced by these masterworks, Botero embarked on a quest to critically re-interpret iconic paintings, paying homage to the great artists of the past whilst finding true originality doing so. Not unlike Picasso, whose Cubist breakthrough came after experimenting with the construction of a guitar, Botero had his artistic revolution with a mandolin. In 1956, the artist painted an image of a mandolin resting on a table and decided to place a disproportionately small hole in the body of the instrument, thus transforming it into an object of exaggerated mass and monumentality; a lifelong fascination with the exploration of volume was born.

Well known for subjects ranging from the Old Masters to circus scenes, bullfights, domestic life and political satire, the present work falls into a theme of brothel scenes and bacchanalia that the artist revisited throughout his career. "There was a red-light district in Medellín at the time," the artist recollects of his adolescence in Colombia. "It was an easy-going place; class lines blurred in a sort of never-ending carnival, a permanent street party." If he sometimes "felt like [he] was the local Toulouse-Lautrec," a sensitive observer of brothels and their late-night habitués, he began to see beauty in all the vagaries of the human body and humour, as well, in its fleshy flamboyance and grandiosity (the artist in: Ana María Escallón, 'From the Inside Out: An Interview with Fernando Botero', Botero: New Works on Canvas, New York 1997, p. 13). Art historically, Botero's brothel scenes are inspired by the lush, arresting depictions of courtesans by the medieval master Lucas Cranach and he has revisited the theme both in painting and sculpture throughout his career.

The vibrant, candy coloured La Casa de Rosalba Correa shares clear characteristics with earlier depictions of the theme, notably La casa de Raquel Vega, from 1975 in the collection of Mumok, Vienna, House Mariduque from 1977 and The House of Amanda Ramírez of 1988 which is in the permanent collection of the Museo de Antioquia in Medellin. The latter, shows a similar rudimentary structure of the room, the stage if you will, whilst the protagonists and distinct elements of the scene differ. We appear to be privy to the final stages of a debauched evening in a room that seems too small to hold its curvaceous inhabitants. The smell of tobacco and stale alcohol lingers in the air, and a swarm of flies' buzzes around a lone lightbulb. Much of the night's events have unfolded but some protagonists are still awake and active. A nude couple shares a large bed in the centre of the room. They have fallen asleep in a loose embrace and only a half-eaten plate of food at the man's feet and the green bottle clutched tightly in his hand hint at the preceding evening. He wears a wedding band suggesting an act of infidelity. Two men, one apparently passed out under the bed not unlike the array of discarded clothes around the room, the other taking a large swig from a bottle, along with a further empty bottle and cigarette buds strewn all over the floor tie in with the theme of a raucous party. In the foreground, a man has swept up a somewhat dispassionate woman in a luscious green dress and clutches her tightly in his arms.

The only protagonist of the scene to look straight out that the viewer, to acknowledge our peeping eye without judgement, is a cat reclining elegantly in the lower right corner. Symbolic for femininity and domesticity, cats feature in much of Botero's work, often accompanying a dominant matriarch or a sensual nude and in La Casa de Rosalba Correa, it is easy to draw on comparisons with Manet's famous masterpiece Olympia. Despite the scene drawing up questions of male prerogative, Botero's female protagonists tend to be strong, self-alert characters, in control of their situation and playing with their allure. The black feline with its piercing green eyes makes us keenly aware that we are trespassing into this scene, the viewer has become a voyeur, an active participant and we have been spotted.

Using humorous and exaggerated elements in his work, Botero breaks with the established classical tradition of eternalizing the classically heroic and brave and adds a fresh approach to age old themes. Botero shifts classical art historical topics into the realm of the common and trivial, the realm of day-to-day life, often infused with a melange of his own lived experiences and the air of his native Colombia.