Botero at the Delaware Art Museum

Last weekend we visited the exhibit, "The Baroque World of Fernando Botero" at the Delaware Art Museum. You will recall that Botero is famous for his voluptuous, corpulent, or even bulbous figures in sculpture and in paintings. He seems to use the style to poke fun at important figures, though he claims that is not his intent. These twin pictures of the "President" and "First Lady" certainly suggest that.


The figures are sitting on his classic bulbous puffy horses that he loves to paint and sculpt.

One of my favorites was the Nuncio (2004), which I found humorous because the Nuncio dwarfs his servant, maybe this is Botero's opinion of the Nuncio's self importance. It was pointed out to me that both are dwarfed by the jungle.

There were several very large sculptures outside in the museum's sculpture garden just for the show.

The cartoony Rape of Europa (1999)


The stocky Hand (1985)

No image is sacred enough to escape the corpulent transformations of his paint brush. This painting of the Crucifixion for instance.


I realized that we have also seen Botero's works in Chile on our honeymoon and this sculpture, Reclining Figure (1984) at the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama.