Photographs courtesy of Marlborough Gallery.

The millionaire artist walks to a corner of his Paris studio, bends over, and picks up an illustration of what has become his instantly recognizable franchise. It is a still-life painting of oversize fruit, the canvas ablaze in color and curves. He moves the painting aside and grabs another, this one a family portrait, each plump character smiling toothlessly as they stand straight and awkward. He is moving these works—the latest in what has been an incredibly profitable career spanning six decades—to show off something else, something very few would have expected out of this neatly dressed, globetrotting man.

“It’s like this parenthesis,” says Fernando Botero. “It’s not like I’m going to now dedicate myself to register every drama or everything that goes wrong in this world because that is not my thing.”

The “parenthesis” is Abu Ghraib, a series of about 60 paintings and drawings reflecting scenes of Iraqi prisoners being tortured by American soldiers in Baghdad’s infamous prison. In one, six prisoners are piled into a twisting mass. Another shows a soldier urinating on two blindfolded inmates, their hands tied tightly behind their backs, and in another, dogs scratch and bite a naked man, blood dripping from his eyes like deformed tears. Prison bars tighten the space of nearly every canvas, and although the paintings remind viewers of the photographs seen around the world, American soldiers remain mostly out of view, creating the sense that this torture could have occurred anywhere.

At the age of 75, the Colombian painter and sculptor—one of the world’s most recognizable—had traded in pleasure for pain.

“A painter somehow should reflect many things,” Botero had said that winter afternoon, sitting in a faded leather chair in the living room of his studio, an airy space tucked away on a narrow street in Paris’s trendy St. Germain district. “In art, you can be free to do whatever you want.”

That may be, but the art world’s reaction to Abu Ghraib has been mixed. Since the time it debuted two years ago in Europe, critics were skeptical that Botero would ever bring the show to an American museum because so many here consider his work naïve, and doubt his ability to tackle serious issues. According to its curator, the Corcoran Gallery of Art passed on the collection not because it was controversial—as Botero has repeatedly said—but because the curator could not imagine the paintings fitting into a larger retrospective of the artist’s career. On the other side, Botero’s supporters considered Abu Ghraib a vital message by an artist whose high profile gave him a powerful platform for protest.

Then, in January, the art made its way to Berkeley, to be greeted with fanfare and long lines. Installed at Doe Library, the series drew an estimated 15,000 visitors over eight weeks and was adored by the media: at an opening-day press conference, several starstruck reporters purchased the 108-page book published to coincide with the show, then asked Botero to sign it. On the opening day, Botero—repeating many of the same quotes in that press conference that he had delivered to me during a three-hour chat nine months earlier in Paris—was treated like a conquering hero not only by the press and the estimated 800 viewers, but also by those who brought the show to Berkeley.

“It far exceeded our expectations in the impact it seemed to have on people,” said Harley Shaiken, director of the Center for Latin American Studies, which organized the event. “Some people couldn’t finish viewing the exhibit. They left. They found it so disturbing. Some people cried and others were angered in ways they didn’t expect.”

The same day the show opened, Botero and Cal English professor and former U.S. poet laureate Robert Hass conducted a 90-minute talk in the crowded auditorium of the International House. The series and talk had all been conceived, planned, and opened in a two-month period, and, Shaiken said, the International House “proved wholly inadequate.” He estimated that 600 people crowded into the space, and the line to get in stretched for several hundred yards down Piedmont Avenue, past the trees in front of Memorial Stadium, where protesters had set up residence to try to block the university’s plan to expand the facility. Shaiken said 1,000 people were turned away and several hundred also were denied entrance to the art’s unveiling following the talk.

The art itself was as disturbing and as powerful as it had been when I saw it in a rural German museum nine months earlier. It may have seemed a bit out of place on the green walls of what is normally a computer lab—the computers remained in the room for the entirety of the show—especially for those who had ever walked through the room to get to the main stacks or used one of the computers.

Although Shaiken would have rather the series be shown in a museum “We basically built a gallery and it worked because it is a beautiful room,” he said. “The art hung well there, and there is also the special significance of the role libraries have played with provocative material. That has been one of the real roles and achievements of public libraries: they house controversial, at times forbidden, material.”

The response was to be expected; if Botero’s Abu Ghraib—and its political message—couldn’t make it in Berkeley, it couldn’t make it anywhere. Botero told the crowd in International House that he obsessed over the series for 14 months, and was perplexed that America could be responsible for such heinous behavior and then equally confused when the country’s museums seemed uninterested.

“If the magazines can [print the photographs] and it can be on the front page of the newspapers, then why not the museums?” Botero asked me in Paris.

The other question seemed to be: Why Botero, the artist who has made millions painting joyous scenes of fat women and royalty?

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