BOTERO Drawings

Fernando Botero, the renowned Colombian painter and sculptor, is also a brilliant draftsman who every day finds, as he declares, more interest and greater joy in the work of pencil on paper. Botero's drawings, which until now had been like the most secret part of his work, are not simply reduced to being notes or sketches for later works but rather contain an end in themselves. Botero has worked on them with growing interest because drawing is not a minor art, on the contrary, it is a risky, concise and demanding artistic language. This book, which rescues a good part of that production, constitutes a splendid gallery of portraits, in which the management of line and the play of proportions is a lesson in virtuosity. The essay by Marc Fumaroli, from the Academie Fran°aise, with which this volume opens, represents a lucid theoretical contribution to the work of Botero as a draftsman, in addition to placing the artist in the new perspective opened by the multiple evaluations of his drawings.