Botero Museum

Fernando Botero was born in Medellin on 19 April 1932 and became one of Latin America's most recognised artists, known for the style often called Boterismo, which depicts people and figures in large, exaggerated volume. Since the 1960s he had also been an art collector, beginning with pre-Columbian pieces and later gathering colonial art, drawings, paintings and modern sculpture. Until 1999 his collections were scattered among his homes in New York, Paris, Monte Carlo and Pietrasanta.

According to Wikipedia, Botero first considered donating his collection to the Museum of Antioquia in Medellin, but delays there led him to accept a proposal from the then mayor of Bogota to give it to the nation through its central bank. In 2000 he donated 208 pieces, 123 of his own and 85 by other international artists, to the Bank of the Republic. The museum, which Botero himself helped adapt, opened to the public on 1 November 2000 in a colonial mansion in La Candelaria, and in 2012 the whole donation was declared an asset of cultural interest of the nation.

The collection includes 123 works by Botero: oil paintings, drawings, pastels, sanguines and sculptures, mostly created in recent decades. His earliest production from the 1940s through the 1960s is not represented here and is instead in the National Museum of Colombia. Among the works is a Boterian version of Leonardo's Mona Lisa, identified by the Ministry of Culture as an important Botero painting, and part of his first series about violence in Colombia.

The remaining 85 pieces come from Botero's private collection and include works by Balthus, Georges Braque, Marc Chagall, Salvador Dali, Joan Miro, Pablo Picasso, Sonia Delaunay, Claude Monet and Henri Matisse. This makes the museum unusual in Colombia for presenting local and international art side by side.

The Botero Museum is managed by Banrepcultural and is part of the La Candelaria cultural complex, together with the Gold Museum, the Luis Angel Arango Library, the Miguel Urrutia Art Museum and the Casa de Moneda museum. Wikipedia reports that it receives over 500,000 visitors a year, including about 2,000 students each month. After Botero's death in 2023 his coffin lay in repose in the museum's courtyard during the funeral ceremonies in Colombia.

The building is a colonial-style house with courtyards, which provides a calm setting for the large, rounded figures. Botero's subjects range from still lifes and musicians to scenes of Colombian daily life, and his humour and political commentary come through in many of them.

The museum sits in the historic centre, within walking distance of the Plaza de Bolivar and the Gold Museum, so it fits easily into a private walking visit of La Candelaria. A guide can help explain Botero's style and the international works around his own.