Pinatas in Oil

The trouble with most Latin American artists today is that they exist by busily grinding out tardy repetitions of styles already arrived, or even through and done with in the world's major art capitals. Fernando Botero, 34, is the kind of exception to this dismal pursuit of fashionable copies that suggests a rule: blend your native vision with the history of all art and forget critics.

A product of Madrid's 214-year-old San Fernando Academy, Colombia-born Botero uses a Renaissance palette of seven oil colors over verdaccio, the greenish base that guarantees lifelike hues. He prefers ocher to the chemical yellows that the impressionists first popularized. Yet his art is as thoroughly contemporary as a giant vinyl hamburger, except that he practices easel painting where others mold plastics. In its carnival colorism it is also as Latin American as bananas and coffee beans (see color).

Any success that Botero has had seems like a counterrevolution. He has worked seven years in New York with only a single private gallery show there. It was panned by daily newspapers and art magazines alike as tasteless. Now a public museum, the Milwaukee Art Center, has taken a gamble and is showing 24 of his oils. He could just be the artist that the Milwaukee made famous.

Botero's Our Lady of New York was a gesture to the big city. "Every little village in Colombia has an Our Lady," he says with a twinkle. Into his bursting composition he paints a current cucurbitaceous self-portrait. Then why another self-portrait at the age of 18 months? "Every artist tells how he started painting in the cradle," he says. Actually he began at 15; his first exhibition in Colombia was so derivative of Van Gogh, Gauguin and others that people thought it was a group show. And it sold out.

Like Venezuelan Sculptress Marisol, whose primitive cubical, often satirical sculptures are a rage in pop circles, Botero depicts gentle impossibilities. He balloons his figures to look like anthropomorphic Latin American pottery. His subjects turn into jugs with ears, stylized pinatas bursting with human presence. With forceful immediacy, as if cartooning from a reproduction of a Renaissance fresco, his simplified images reflect the innocent expressionism of old Spanish colonial art and the sunlit geometries of its architecture.

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