One of the world's greatest living artists, Fernando Botero has produced some 80 paintings, drawings and watercolors of the Abu Ghraib horrors. His trademark rounded figures are shown with hoods on, shackled, bound at the wrists, forced into human piles, bleeding, screaming and vomiting.
"Shocked and angered by the news of Abu Ghraib," explains Botero, he was inspired to put his familiar figures through the rigors and humiliations of the abuse that American soldiers perpetrated on Iraqi inmates at the notorious prison. "I, like everyone else, was shocked by the barbarity, especially because the United States is supposed to be this model of compassion."
Until now, this extraordinary series has failed to find a home in the United States. Botero's repeated attempts to donate the entire collection to an American museum--museums that would normally kill for Botero paintings--have been met with shut doors, hung up phones and unanimous "no's."
Botero's work is included in such places as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Mo.
And the Abu Ghraib collection has already toured in Italy and Germany and is scheduled for museums in France and Spain. Surely the embarrassment and reputation damage that America will suffer from this tour will be exacerbated as museum goers in other countries learn that the work has mostly been rejected and "censored" in the United States.
But as America struggles to pretend that the President of The United States is not a war criminal guilty of ordering torture and violating international law and major treaties, American museums have been slavishly towed the "company" line.
Fortunately, the courageous Marlborough Gallery in New York City reminds us that this used to be a country where people had the courage and the right to dissent and speak openly against government abuse and atrocities.
According to the art critic for The Washington Post:
"The Abu Ghraib series feels more like a catalog of dark memories, a compendium of outrages captured in a long-established people's vernacular, as a hedge against obfuscation and oblivion. These illustrations form a kind of history book, not one written by the victors but one sketched and colored by the meek of the earth, hidden away until the tables are turned and the truth can come out."
Botero explains: "Art is a permanent accusation."
These deeply disturbing and brutally honest paintings will be available for viewing from this coming Tuesday, October 17 through November 18. The gallery, located at 40 West 57th Street, is open Monday-Saturday, 10 a.m-5:30 p.m.
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