Do we like them?

Do we like Fernando Botero?

Our score: 8 out of 10. He gave away huge amounts of art and pointed his anger at cruelty, with only a minor stain and a gap in the record on LGBTQ+ issues.

Botero was born in Medellín in 1932, decided at 14 he'd be an artist, and had his first solo show in Bogotá in 1951. He studied in Madrid and Mexico, moved to New York in 1960, and in that decade began experimenting with volume, which gave the world those inflated figures. From the 1970s he added bronze and marble sculpture to the painting.

The famous plump look is a sore point with him. In a 2014 interview he said “I don't paint fat women. Nobody believes me but it is true,” insisting that what he paints is volume and the sensuality of form, and that it runs through his still lifes, animals and landscapes too. Take that as the artist's own account, but it's consistent across decades.

The nearest thing to a scandal is a tax stoush. Italian authorities argued he owed taxes on works made in Italian factories and sold around the world, and an Italian court acquitted him in 2011, ending a two-year dispute. The only other blemish we found is small: in 2009 a prize for young Latin American artists was scrapped after he publicly criticised its winners, as Art Daily reported.

On the harm test, we found nothing nasty. His best-known political work is the Abu Ghraib series, made after the prison scandal, which he said left him “moved by the hypocrisy of the situation”, and he also painted Colombia's violence and the death of Pablo Escobar. We found no campaigning against LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet, but we also found little from him on LGBTQ+ issues, so that's a gap rather than a gold star.

Nothing new on him lately in terms of conduct. He died in 2023, and the posthumous news is exhibitions and auctions rather than anything about him as a person.

The good stuff is real. He gave 23 statues to a Medellín park, 180 paintings to Colombia's Central Bank (which became Bogotá's Botero Museum), and the whole Abu Ghraib collection to UC Berkeley in 2009. His bronze bird in Medellín was dynamited in 1995, killing 22 people, and he later had a replacement placed beside the wreck as a memorial.