Professor Butter Beard and Fernando Botero’s “Marie Antoinette”
“Life is like an ear of buttered corn, waiting to get stuck in your teeth.” – Truant D. Memphis
“What a good lookin’ corn-fed boy you are!” Argh! I can hear that phrase so clearly as it purred off the tongues of Uncle Mark and Aunt Opal’s brood at every summer family picnic on their Ohio farm. Yes, I will admit that I was brought up “among the corn.” I would hide from chores for hours sitting between the corn rows reading Tolkien and Dickens in my short cut-off jeans, swiping the black flies away with my father’s worn Mogadore Wildcats cap. I first learned to drive in those fields, graduating from the ole tractor to a Volkswagen bug. And, it was there in those same rows, under the midnight stars and full moon, that I also lost my…… But, that is a different tale.
All those thoughts came bursting back into my present day, as I sat and listened to a university sophomore present her final artist exhibition for this semester. I hate to admit that I had grown a bit weary of eight Vincent exhibitions in a row, chosen because the student had noted that van Gogh was my favorite artist, and chances were good they would receive an “A.” And then along comes Erin, who wakes me up with a presentation on Fernando Botero with an opening statement: “I chose Mr. Botero because each portrait reminds me of a corn-fed Weeble.”
Well played, Erin!
And now, at least for this week, Mr. Botero has also become my personal favorite. Born on April 19th, 1932, in Medellín (northwestern South America), Botero was enrolled in bullfighting school by his uncle at age 12 before realizing, a couple of years later, that he wanted to devote his life to art instead. At 19, he had his first solo art show at Leo Matiz’s gallery in Bogotá, and in 1952, he won second place at the Salon Nacional de Artistas, a prestigious cultural event, which prompted him to travel to Europe and study in Madrid, Florence, and Paris.
He began to develop his exaggerated voluptuous figures style, now known globally as “Boterismo,” while living in Mexico in the 1960s. The story goes that he was first inclined to experiment with proportions while drawing a hole in a mandolin that didn’t quite match the size of the rest of the instrument. “There was something exciting about the dynamic of plasticity in these wild proportions,” he explained in an interview with Artforum in 1985. “I had been looking for a way to create a language of plasticity that would be effective, and that people would be touched by, since I decided to be an artist.”
“Botero’s satire is not heavy-handed,” art critic Peter Schjeldahl once wrote, “though it is blatant, because his paintings work finally like dreams rather than like cartoons. There is something about his silly, fleshy monsters that is intimate and familiar, a faintly scary reminder of the self in one of its primitive guises.”
His exaggerated, spherical figures, rendered in a kaleidoscopic color palette, first brought him significant attention in 1961, when Dorothy C. Miller, a curator from the Museum of Modern Art, purchased his painting “Mona Lisa, Age Twelve.” But it wasn’t until 1972 that Botero had his first major show, at the Marlborough Gallery in New York City. A retrospective of his work at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., would follow in 1979, and in the early ’90s, his oversized sculptures were exhibited along the Champs-Élysées in Paris and Park Avenue in New York.
Salomé Gómez-Upeguid writes, “Despite the severe reactions of some art critics who didn’t see the value in his aesthetic and dismissed it as vapid and uninteresting (art critic Rosalind Krauss famously described Botero’s work as “terrible,” comparing it to images of the Pillsbury Doughboy), he became an art-market powerhouse whose output was valued at millions of dollars.” In 2023, his sculpture “Man on a Horse” sold for $4.3 million at Christie’s.
Botero produced thousands of pieces, both paintings and sculptures, over the course of his decades-long career, and well into his 80s, he was known to spend entire days in his studio, laboring over his “brought-to-life” dreams. “Fernando Botero is one of the most disciplined people you can meet. His friends and family affirm that he works every day of every year,” his son Juan Carlos Botero wrote in “The Art of Fernando Botero,” a book about the artist’s life published in 2013. “For Botero there are no rest dates, no holidays, no weekends.”
Botero once said, “I want to paint anything I feel like…but with the hope that everything I do will be touched by this Latin American spirit.” I understand. I want to bake anything I feel. The kitchen becomes my studio, with an artist’s palette of sugar, butter and eggs. And corn. Apparently, there will always be corn.
This week, I treated myself (post final grades) to a pair of new Nordic “Corn Cake Pans.” Inspired by Botero’s Rubenesque corn-fed creations and to accompany my Sunday craving of “meatballs and sauce,” I whipped up a new recipe for corn sticks with toasted corn meal and two kinds of pepper, frozen fresh corn and local honey from last season’s farmer’s market, and plenty of rich buttermilk and butter.
Lisa Shearin wrote, “Grandma said her cast iron skillet's good for three things: frying chicken, baking corn bread, and going upside an obstinate man's head.” Let’s hope my new cast iron pans don’t take that journey, or I will be singing the “Cell Block Tango” in a bad “Law and Order” episode. This week bake some corn cakes, spend some time with Botero and his voluptuous dream-portraits, and I’ll see ya, lost in the corn fields forever.
Honey Cornbread Sticks
10 Sticks
¾ cup coarse cornmeal
½ tsp chili powder
½ tsp freshly ground black pepper
¾ cup all-purpose flour
3 Tbsp granulated sugar
1 Tbsp baking powder
½ tsp fine sea salt
¾ cup buttermilk
3 Tbsp unsalted butter, melted
1 large egg and 1 additional yolk
2 Tbsp honey
1 cup corn kernels (fresh or frozen)
1) Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and spray two corn cake pans with baking spray with flour.
2) Toast the cornmeal, chili powder and black pepper in a cast iron skillet over medium heat until toasty and aromatic. Empty the mix into a large glass bowl.
3) Whisk in the all-purpose flour, baking powder and salt.
4) In a small bowl, whisk together the melted butter, buttermilk, one egg and one additional yolk, and the honey.
5) Fold the wet into the dry and then fold in the corn kernels. Cover the batter with plastic wrap and let sit for at least 30 minutes while the oven heats.
6) Fill the pan cavities ¾ of the way full and bake for 8 minutes. Rotate the pans and bake for 5 minutes more, until the top is golden brown and spring back slightly to the touch.
7) Cool the cakes in the pans for 10 minutes and then invert onto a cooling rack.
