Colombian-born Fernando Botero (b. 1932) is a painter, sculptor, and draftsman renowned for his extravagantly rounded figures combining the polish and excess of Spanish colonial baroque with the social realism of the Mexican muralists. Their humorous exaggeration belies the more serious content of Botero’s work—commentary on colonialism, political instability in Latin America, and the vernacular artistic traditions of the region, as well as European art history. Accompanying the artist’s first American retrospective in over thirty years, The Baroque World of Fernando Botero is the most extensive study of his life and work to date. Drawn exclusively from Botero’s private collection, the 100 works featured in this book, including previously unpublished paintings and drawings, represent the full scope of his oeuvre from a uniquely personal perspective. Many of these—portraits of friends and family members and remembered scenes—have remained in the artist’s possession since their creation, while others he has bought back over the years as markers of significant developments in his career. Three essays examine the artist’s creative life, from the aesthetic environment in which Botero developed his unique style to his catalyzing influence on the Colombian art world of the 1960s and 70s.

September 14 - November 6, 1993

"One of the most popular artists alive today, Fernando Botero creates paintings with a powerful monumentality that immediately captures the viewer. The joyfully rotund humans who populate his canvasses are among the most recognizable figures in twentieth-century art. But it is women in particular who have always fascinated Botero and make up the core of his long career. This deluxe volume, the first devoted solely to this theme, includes 50 unpublished works and a total of more than 150 paintings, drawings and sketches. With their bulbous figures and solid flesh, Botero's women evoke a primal sensuality and voluptuousness. But, they are also betrayed with a playful sense of humor and underlying irony. Never voyeuristic, his paintings are more complex celebrations of the female form - its palpable plentitude, its sensual exuberance, and its impenetrable mystery." -- back cover.

This volume traces the history of painting from medieval times to modern times with a focus on each era and its major artists. This volume traces the history of painting from medieval times to modern times with a focus on each era and its major artists.

The drawings and watercolors handsomely illustrated in this volume provide a comprehensive overview of Fernando Botero's work in this media, which has seldom been reproduced. An introductory essay by Prof. Edward J. Sullivan of New York University, and biographical notes complete the catalogue and provide a framework for these superb but less well-known works by Botero. With consummate technical ability, this important twentieth century artist has revived the use of ancient materials: sanguine, charcoal, sepia pencil, wash and ink. Most of his drawings are executed on paper, sometimes on canvas, with great attention paid to the quality of the support. Botero uses a variety of drawing techniques. Some pieces are preparatory drawings for entire compositions - usually quick sketches of a drawing or sculpture - but the majority are independent works of art that rarely, if ever, repeat a composition the artist has executed in oils. Botero draws with affection. Each stroke of the pen or brush is applied with the knowledge that it will create another small but important part of the rich world populated by sensuous figures that has evolved throughout the years in the imagination of the artist. These drawings compel us to confront Botero's art and personality even more directly than in his paintings. In examining them with care, we are privileged to receive a glimpse into the creative mind and fertile imagination of this master. Looking at his drawings we can almost follow the genesis of the artist's ideas. It is as if we were seated at his side in intimate dialogue with him, watching his hand create the simulacra of his inner imagination.

Over the course of some two centuries following the conquests and consolidations of Spanish rule in the Americas during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries—the period designated as the Baroque—new cultural forms sprang from the cross-fertilization of Spanish, Amerindian, and African traditions. This dynamism of motion, relocation, and mutation changed things not only in Spanish America, but also in Spain, creating a transatlantic Hispanic world with new understandings of personhood, place, foodstuffs, music, animals, ownership, money and objects of value, beauty, human nature, divinity and the sacred, cultural proclivities—a whole lexikon of things in motion, variation, and relation to one another. Featuring the most creative thinking by the foremost scholars across a number of disciplines, the Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque is a uniquely wide-ranging and sustained exploration of the profound cultural transfers and transformations that define the transatlantic Spanish world in the Baroque era. Pairs of authors—one treating the peninsular Spanish kingdoms, the other those of the Americas—provocatively investigate over forty key concepts, ranging from material objects to metaphysical notions. Illuminating difference as much as complementarity, departure as much as continuity, the book captures a dynamic universe of meanings in the various midst of its own re-creations. The Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque joins leading work in a number of intersecting fields and will fire new research—it is the indispensible starting point for all serious scholars of the early modern Spanish world.

"The 'Madonna and child' known as 'The Dudley Madonna' was painted around 1508 by Giovanni Belline (c. 1430-1516), one of the most celebrated of Italian artists. This book charts the painting's recent provenance and reception and revisits the context in which it was created. It retraces its critical history from Dudley's nineteenth-century London until today, and reassesses and autograph work by Bellini that during the twentieth century was almost completely overlooked. The years 1505-10 were crucial to Giovanni Bellini's career, and this book examines anew the part he played in the Venetian High Renaissance, noting his response to the upcoming generation (above all Titian) and new ideas coming from central Italy - from Raphael and in particular from the visiting Florentine Fra Bartolomeo." -- book flyleaf.