Abu Ghraib Paintings

[FernBell]

From the text of a review article at www.slate.com

When I first heard that Fernando Botero, the Colombian artist famous for his stylized, whimsically pudgy figures, had created a series of paintings depicting the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, I expected the images to be grotesquely, even criminally, kitschy. The world of Botero's paintings is generally cheerful and warmly nostalgic, full of puffy people in colorful folkloric costumes, dancing, eating, or posing placidly. The reports from Abu Ghraib, by contrast, described a nightmarish realm of pain, humiliation, and sadistic depravity. The meeting of these two worlds, I imagined, would result in something akin to Hello Kitty at Dachau.

I was wrong. Botero's Abu Ghraib paintings, now on view at the Marlborough Gallery in New York, are searingly powerful. And it is precisely the discordance between the cartoonish style of the images and the sordid reality of the atrocities they depict that gives them their emotional intensity. By portraying the Iraqi prisoners as stylized Everyman figures, Botero's pictures do something that even the most vivid photographs of torture don't do: They encourage us to identify with the victims.

Abu Ghraib 50, 2005


Abu Ghraib 31, 2005


Massacre in Colombia, 1999


Official Portrait of the Military Junta, 1971


Abu Ghraib 53, 2005


Abu Ghraib 52, 2005


Abu Ghraib 59, 2005


Abu Ghraib 58, 2005


Abu Ghraib 57, 2005

[FloridaPat]

1. Proud to be an American.

[Annces]

2. It is good he is giving a voice to what happened

So horrible to look at, but will be easier when there is distance from the events.