Terror on Canvas

By Vivienne Walt

Even in a serene, sunlit atelier on Paris' Left Bank, the life-size paintings propped against the wall cast a pall of terror. A hulking dog snarls with bared fangs over a naked man lying bloodied and bound on a concrete floor. Naked, hooded bodies lie tangled in a pile. A blindfolded prisoner stands in red women's underwear. The scenes of abuse by U.S. military prison guards in Abu Ghraib, near Baghdad, are unmistakable, almost as much as the painter's style. The Colombian artist Fernando Botero is, by his own admission, best known as "the painter of fat people," and his American soldiers and Iraqi prisoners are as rotund as his comic ballerinas. But there's no humor here. His 48 paintings and drawings of Abu Ghraib have a haunting grimness that "came out of the heart," Botero told TIME. On a flight from Bogota to Paris last November, Botero saw an article on the abuses and was inspired to pull out his sketchbook. "I began drawing immediately, and when I got to Paris, I kept going," he says. Botero, 73, says artists have for too long abandoned warfare to photojournalists. Picasso's Guernica became the most lasting image of the Spanish Civil War, yet there is no great art depicting the Vietnam War, he says--or, thus far, the war in Iraq. Botero's paintings and charcoal drawings will be unveiled in June at Rome's Palazzo Venezia, as part of a retrospective of his work, which will then travel to Germany, Greece and the U.S. But as of now, the Abu Ghraib series will not be part of the U.S. exhibition because it was organized before the works were created. And they will never go on sale, he says. "I want them as a testimonial. This will be remembered." --By Vivienne Walt