Fernando Botero’s Los Amantes (The Lovers) of 1970 portrays an exquisitely rendered boudoir scene where a partially nude and amorous couple is locked in a tender embrace. Imposing in scale and painted in pastel colors, Los Amantes is a monumental exercise in the plasticity of form. Bursting with intimacy and sensuality, the work unveils the comical hyperbole often associated with Botero’s mature body of work. Notwithstanding the artist’s satirical commentary, it is his relentless admiration for the great masters of the past—and most precisely, the art historical achievement of Northern European painting—that has inspired his immediately identifiable and voluminous characters for over six decades. Moreover, Botero’s paintings maintain a pivotal element of didacticism, as he said: “[they] function within free, imaginative, innovative parameters...it is not a matter of creating the kind of beauty that fits into the classical canons. The purpose, rather, is to reach a stage at which it has become possible to surprise and be surprised” (Carlos Fuentes, Botero: Women, New York, 2003, n.p.).
"Why don't people laugh at the proportions when they see Romanesque art or pre-Columbian art? For centuries there was this kind of form. And now all of a sudden it is necessarily a satire. In the very beginning, some of my paintings were done with a satirical idea. But these were almost exclusively in the beginning, as when I did the presidential family, and the dictators. My deeper interest is in the sensual, plastic language of painting and in the expansion of form."
The present painting belongs to a series of sensual and gracefully executed works produced during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Throughout this period, Botero thoughtfully inserts his lovers into the canon of Western art through a direct association with European precedents. Among these, of course, are the fleshy paintings by Courbet and Boucher which overall tonality and expression have been noted as primary sources of inspiration. In contrast to the saccharine rococo interiors of François Boucher, where rosy female nudes suggestively posed amidst soft clouds of silk and satin to arouse a male viewer, Botero presents a self-assured couple candidly acknowledging their participation in a most private moment.
Perhaps as the result of its minimal décor, the viewer is immediately attracted to the forbidden relationship between the two figures—a visible ring reveals the social status of the female figure as a married woman. Upon closer inspection, however, a predictable and explicit eroticism is decidedly absent here. Innocently tucked in bed like two content children, they offer little in terms of psychological introspection. Most revealing however, are the two flies that conspicuously hover over the couple’s bed. Although Botero claims that the purpose of the flies is to create space when they fly over a flat field of color, one also suspects that they offset some of the sweetness of the picture. Likewise, the strategically placed mirror behind the couple serves to involve the viewer as a witness to the event; a pictorial device arguably borrowed from Monet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère of 1882. While highly narrative and relatable, Botero's body of work is anything but naïve. Conveying a love of life, tradition and family, he has permanently avoided classification and continues to be a source of joy for collects ors around the world.
Botero | Trailer | Don Millar | Fernando Botero | Miriam Basilio | Juan Carlos Botero
