Botero Sculpture

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

It's impossible not to like Fernando Botero's sculpture, an outgrowth of the Colombian artist's constant search for three-dimensionality that pervades his popular paintings of puffy endomorphs. His sculpted women are monumental oceans of flesh, beckoning and vulnerable at once; the Little Whore with her elephantine thighs parodies our carnal urges. His statues peer out anxiously with small eyes as if seeking a meaning to life. In creating a plump general, a bishop or a Roman soldier, Botero mocks the fixity of energies channeled into manipulation, power and control. Boisterous and touching at once, with echoes of pre-Columbian art, his oversized sculptures are a human comedy for our time. A gleaming polychrome snake, a whimsical horse with tresses and a winsome plaster dog are also within the reach of this versatile artist, who is now based in Italy. Fifty color plates and 125 duotones complement an intelligent text by Sullivan, who teaches art history at New York University. (December 4

Library Journal

In this very beautifully produced volume, Sullivan offers the most comprehensive investigation of Botero's intriguing and sometimes bizarre images. Sullivan does an exemplary job of research into the Colombian and native traditions to be found in Botero's sculpture (and much of what he points out is equally applicable to Botero's work in other media). Botero scholarship in English has seldom dealt so well with these iconographic and formal issues. The massive figures so omnipresent in Botero's work, in Sullivan's view, express the artist's pre-Columbian roots as well as his interest in Western art traditions. Botero is probably the most important and most well-known Latin American artist at work today, so the mislabeling and reversal of some images in the book is quite irritating. For collections on comtemporary art or Latin American culture. Patricia Scott, Art Dept., Eastern Illionis Univ., Charleston