Botero Museum
Bogota, Colombia's Museum dedicated to the work of Fernando Botero
Suite101 writer Mike Gerrard fills in with details of his trip to Bogota, Colombia and the incredible Botero Museum.
Fernando Botero is a Colombian artist whose series of 'fat people' shows skill, humour, whimsicality, kindness, cruelty and biting satire all at the same time. He gave his own personal collection of work to the city of Bogota in 2004, and the Botero Museum is the result of that bequest.
Botero himself oversaw every aspect of its construction, which was one of the conditions of his bequest. Another was that it should be free. He also chose the building, the colour scheme, the lighting and the arrangement of the works.
As well as 123 of his own paintings, including his take on famous works like the Mona Lisa, he donated 85 pieces by other artists showing that Botero must have made a few dollars in his time. The warren of rooms on two floors has paintings and sculptures by the likes of Dali, Renoir, Monet, Corot, Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, Miro, Chagall, Max Ernst, Chirico, Giacometti and Lucian Freud. Following the bequest Botero produced a series of 50 paintings as a response to the Abu Ghraib torture scenes, which he will be donating to museums everywhere after the exhibition has toured the world.
We'd asked our tour guide if it was safe to walk around the Candelaria district, Bogota's lovely old town. 'Of course,' he said, 'it's perfectly safe. This is the problem we have in Colombia. Everyone thinks there are kidnappers and drug-dealers on every street corner. Please walk round, and see for yourself. The crime rate is higher in Miami and Washington than it is in Bogota. It's true! You can check the figures.' So I did. As far as I could make out, the annual murder rate in Washington DC is 50 per 100,000 population, the worst in the developed world, and in Bogota it's 40-50 per 100,000, marginally less. So it is safer in Colombia's capital than it is in the USA's.
We walked around the Candelaria and enjoyed seeing the Colonial architecture and the two-tone buildings. The top half would be green or yellow, the bottom half blue or ochre, pretty and vivid colours. And we didn't get killed, kidnapped or offered cocaine. We did see lots of smiling faces, a national characteristic. At Bogota airport, leaving for home, I asked an American tourist what he thought of Colombia. 'I never saw so many teeth,' he said.
For more of Mike Gerrard's writing, please visit his page at Suite101: http://ukirelandtravel.suite101.com/
