NYT:'Great Crime' at Abu Ghraib Enrages and Inspires Artist Botero(photos)

[DeepModem Mom]

'Great Crime' at Abu Ghraib Enrages and Inspires an Artist
By JUAN FORERO
Published: May 8, 2005

BOGOTÁ, Colombia, May 7 - Fernando Botero, Latin America's best-known living artist, shocked the art world last year when he broke sharply from his usual depictions of small town life to reveal new works that depicted Colombia's war in horrific detail.

Now, Mr. Botero, 73, who lives in Paris and New York, has taken on an even more explosive topic: the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Forty-eight paintings and sketches - of naked prisoners attacked by dogs, dangling from ropes, beaten by guards, in a mangled heap of bodies - will be exhibited in Rome at the Palazzo Venezia museum on June 16.

"These works are a result of the indignation that the violations in Iraq produced in me and the rest of the world," Mr. Botero said by telephone from his Paris studio.

"I began to do some very fluid drawings, and then I began to paint and the results are 50 works inspired by this great crime."

Mr. Botero said the paintings and sketches, done in oils, pencil and charcoal and part of a 170-piece traveling exhibition, would also be shown at the Würth Museum in Germany in October and at the Pinacoteca in Athens next year before returning to Germany. The exhibition was first made public last month, when Diners, a Colombian magazine, published photographs of the works....




All photos: Diners Magazine


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/08/international/americas/08botero.html?hp

[Lori Price CLG]

1. Gee, Ralph Nader (Barf Nadir) said there was no difference between...

George W. Bush and Al Gore, during the summer of 2000. Suffice to say at this juncture - 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians and the US Abu Ghraib's 'Guernica' later - there was, in fact, a *difference.*

Lori Price

[icymist]

2. Oh come on! Those were just fraternity pranks!

American is a Christian nation fighting those 'evil doers'.
*sarcasm*

From the Article:
He said he read about Abu Ghraib in The New Yorker, then followed European news accounts. Calling himself an admirer of the United States - one of his sons lives in Miami - Mr. Botero said he became incensed because he expected better of the American government.

Makes you proud to be an American, don't it?
:sarcasm:

[countmyvote4real]

3. How come the rest of the world gets to see this tour and we don't?

Nevermind.

[leftchick]

4. Surely there has to be a Museum in NYC that would show this?

One can dream.