Botero renders American torturers of Iraqi prisoners

[understandinglife]

'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. A guard and a prisoner are featured in one of 48 works to be exhibited in Rome.

A painting in a series by Fernando Botero shows prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Mr. Botero said that as an admirer of the United States, he expected better of the American government.
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.

(more at the link):

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

www.missionnotaccomplished.us - STOP THE ATROCITIES; INDICT AND PROSECUTE BU$H AND ALL THE OTHER WAR CRIMINALS, NOW



Now, Botero can turn his attention to Bu$h's other crimes against humanity -- he's going to be a very busy artist

[chlamor]

1. Awesome post

The artists and the poets tell us.

Nominated

[understandinglife]

3. Yes, it is always the artists and poets who expose the evil in ways...

.... that only the evil refuse to see, and typically do everything they can to suppress.

They will fail because we will spread the truth and the expositions of the truth as rendered by brave artists and poets.

Bu$h you are going to The Hague, count on it. And, not to worry, you will have several fristian neoconster companions with you.

Peace.


www.missionnotaccomplished.us

[EFerrari]

8. When it enters our art, it is no longer possible to ignore.

Bu$h, you are going to The Hague, with your criminal cronies

www.missionnotaccomplished.us

[merh]

2. Not in my name.

I want my nation back. :cry:

We can change things, we must change things.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x1768573

[efhmc]

4. Great artist. Telling the truth through his art.

[Nothing Without Hope]

5. This is important and heartbreakingly sad. This is how the world sees

my country now, the country with so many good, kind people. And this is what my country has done to the world.

Recommended. Of course.

[Wilms]

6. It is, so often, the artist who pierces the darkness of our blind eyes.

And who are blessed as they take on these burdens, reaching within, where Christ is revealed.

[understandinglife]

7. What amazed me is that it is on the New York Times homepage....

.... along with a full 'audio slide show' that places the torture at Abu Ghraib in the historical context of other atrocities depicted by Botero. Message amplified, thereby, big time.

Peace.


www.missionnotaccomplished.us - INDICT AND PROSECUTE BU$H AND ALL THE OTHER WAR CRIMINALS

[dzika]

9. It hurts to look at this art...

but we need to keep our eyes open to the pain. It says so much about what we have allowed to happen.

Voted this post for greatest page.

[Straight Shooter]

10. It bears repeating: Republicans encourage and advocate torture.

It isn't the Democrats who want to torture, or who think it's okay to torture. This is a Republican administration, its supporters and its apologists which advocate the use of torture against prisoners and detainees, often in the absence of any incriminating evidence whatsoever.

This heinous torture scandal is not going away. Bravo, Fernando!

[bvar22]

11. OMG.

[understandinglife]

12. Yes. In_deed. I didn't want to post all of them at once. Thank you for ...

.... posting those.

This WILL STICK, FOREVER


www.missionnotaccomplished.us - INDICT AND PROSECUTE BU$H AND ALL THE OTHER WAR CRIMINALS, NOW

[merh]

13. We have to make them stop.

We are accomplices if we turn away from their crimes or to ignore their crimes.

We must stop them. :cry:

[EFerrari]

14. kick for truth n/t

[opihimoimoi]

15. Another kick from Kaneohe...... :o(

[EFerrari]

16. Yikes! That looks like an eye chart to me. What does that

mean? :)

[opihimoimoi]

17. my happy face :o) and my unhappy is :o(

Those drawings made me sad,.... das is all.

[EFerrari]

18. I know. We will stop this. n/t

[merh]

19. How do we get people to understand?

:cry: This is the BFEE, this is not all of us. :cry:

[understandinglife]

20. American Deaths Since war began (3/19/03): 1601 - 7 'til MNA 1608

American Deaths Since war began (3/19/03): 1601
http://www.antiwar.com/casualties/

What to do?
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=3588644&mesg_id=3588644

Peace.


www.missionnotaccomplished.us

[Wilms]

21. .

[understandinglife]

22. So, where will the memorial for all those Bu$h slaughtered be located?

A Forest of Pillars, Recalling the Unimaginable

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
Published: May 9, 2005

BERLIN - In the 15 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, the nation has struggled - painfully and sometimes defensively - to come to terms with its Nazi past. Nowhere has that been more evident than in Berlin, the restored capital, where a vast rebuilding effort has transformed the once-ravaged city center.

A cobblestone walkway leads between the pillars at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which formally opens on Tuesday.

A view of the information center at the memorial, where the display includes letters from those on their way to concentration camps.
The new Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, designed by Peter Eisenman, is the apotheosis of this soul-searching. A vast grid of 2,711 concrete pillars whose jostling forms seem to be sinking into the earth, it is able to convey the scope of the Holocaust's horrors without stooping to sentimentality - showing how abstraction can be the most powerful tool for conveying the complexities of human emotion."

(more at link):

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/09/arts/design/09holo.html?hp

www.missionnotaccomplished.us - STOP THE ATROCITIES; INDICT AND PROSECUTE BU$H AND ALL THE OTHER FRISTIAN-VALUED, NEOCONSTER WAR CRIMINALS

[Wilms]

23. kick n/t

[Judi Lynn]

24. Thanks for the article. Here are two more photos of other paintings:

(On edit: this photo doesn't come through on posting, but it can be seen at the link.)

Famed Artist Paints Abu Ghraib
by Mark Vallen -Art For A Change
(No verified email address) 14 Apr 2005
"Fernando Botero’s latest paintings go beyond anything he’s ever created in the past. He’s completed his masterwork, a suite of 50 large oil paintings depicting the horrors perpetrated by Americans at Iraq’s infamous Abu Ghraib prison." (A variety of articles about the intersection of art and politics can be found at the Art For A Change web log: www.art-for-a-change.com/blog)
(snip)

http://boston.indymedia.org/newswire/display/35157/index.php

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~



Captured on Canvas
Colombian artist explores images of Abu Ghraib on canvas

By VIVIENNE WALT

Sunday, Apr. 17, 2005
Even in a serene, sunlit atelier on Paris' Left Bank, the life-size paintings propped against the wall cast a pall of terror. A hulking dog snarls with bared fangs over a naked man lying bloodied and bound on a concrete floor. Naked, hooded bodies lie entangled in a pile. A blindfolded prisoner stands in women's red underwear. The paintings need no titles. The scenes of abuse by U.S. military prison guards in Abu Ghraib, west of Baghdad, are unmistakable, almost as much as the painter's style itself. The Colombian artist Fernando Botero is, by his own admission, best known as "the painter of fat people," and his U.S. soldiers and Iraqi prisoners are as rotund as his comic ballerinas. But there's no humor here. His 48 paintings and drawings on Abu Ghraib have a haunting grimness that "came out of the heart," Botero told TIME.
(snip)

http://www.time.com/time/europe/magazine/article/0,13005,901050425-1050217,00.html

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~



Posted on Sat, Apr. 23, 2005


FRANCOIS MORI/AP
COMMENTARY ON ABU GHRAIB: Colombian artist Fernando Botero displays paintings that evolved from photos of brutal acts by U.S. military prison guards in Iraq.

Botero is no stranger to blunt social criticism

BY TIMOTHY PRATT
Special to The Herald

....He read accounts of the acts committed by U.S. military prison guards, including the New Yorker story that broke the news. The stories repulsed him, he said.

He also saw the photos. And though the paintings -- a snarling dog menacing a prisoner, piles of naked bodies -- evoke those photos, Botero did not try to copy them.

''It was important to see the photos, but it wasn't important to reproduce them,'' he said. ``A painter makes visible what is invisible.''

Having made his vision of what happened in Abu Ghraib visible, Botero hopes to leave a ``testimony of a monstrosity.''
(snip)

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/entertainment/11459420.htm
(Free registration is required)



the artist

[understandinglife]

25. Thank you for posting the additional information. (nt)

www.missionnotaccomplished.us -- Prepare for "MNA 1608"; it is soon upon us, tragically.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x3588644

[understandinglife]

26. MNA 1608: The tragic Day 2 of MissionNOTAccomplished ....

.... is soon upon us.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=3588644&mesg_id=3628099

Peace.


www.missionnotaccomplished.us

[understandinglife]

27. "MNA 1608" has tragically arrived.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x3632200

Peace.


www.missionnotaccomplished.us