Post-War & Contemporary Art

Irving Galleries, Palm Beach, Florida

Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1998

Lot Essay:

Married in January of 1988, Ted and Sherri Pincus loved to travel the world and began collecting art early in their marriage. Ted was the Chairman and CEO of the Financial Relations Board, an international public relations firm based in Chicago, with offices throughout the United States. Sherri, his wife, has extensive experience as a professional chef, cooking teacher, and cookbook author. During one trip, they visited a large, outdoor Fernando Botero exhibit in Florence, Italy and decided that one day they would acquire one of his pieces for their collection. Purchased in 1998 from Irving Galleries in Palm Beach, Florida, the lovely Ballerina appealed to them because of her voluptuous grace and balance. Ballerina, 1981, is representative of Botero’s distinctive style of volumetric, over-sized shapes with unexpected shifts in scale. Drawing from art historical themes that range from the Middle Ages, the Italian quattrocento, and Latin American colonial art to the modern trends of the 20th century, the artist’s large cast of characters form one of the most unique bodies of work in 20th and 21st century art.

Botero’s interest in art began in Colombia, where he was born in 1932. It was here that he was exposed to pre-Columbian and Spanish colonial art and began to make his own drawings and watercolors at an early age. In 1952, he was awarded a Second Prize at the National Salon in Bogotá. With the money Botero earned from this award, the young artist traveled to Europe, where he encountered the work of the Old Masters, as well as the avant-garde art of Picasso and Braque. As a result, much of his work contains references to such European masters as Jan Van Eyck and Peter Paul Rubens and embraces the Renaissance tradition of abundantly fleshed nudes and statuesque figures. It was also during these formative years in Europe that Botero began to simplify his images and developed his signature style of monumental, smoothly rounded figures and inflated shapes that expand across the composition. In the 1970s, Botero’s dedication to the expression of volume and mass led to the translation of his oversized images on canvas into sculpture, producing enormous bronze figures and animals.

The simplicity and dimensions of Ballerina can be linked to pre-Columbian works, in which broad torsos and flared hips and thighs are common features. Likewise, the dancer’s almond-shaped eyes that stare resolutely ahead recall those of the Tolita-Tumaco figures from ancient Columbia and Ecuador. However, Botero has modernized his sculpture in its subject matter. With her left leg and right arm upraised, Ballerina gracefully balances on her powerfully muscular right leg. The stance is similar to those of Degas’ dancers, who are seemingly suspended in uncertain mid-motion, in danger of losing balance. With his desire to represent tangible volume in monumental form, Botero’s dancer instead confidently possesses the space in which she exists. The artist has distilled the essence of shape and volume, the figure’s plastic form a celebration of strength and vigor. “Sculpture enables me to create real volumes,” Botero once reflected. “Sculpture is like a caress. You touch the form, you can give the forms the softness, the sensuality you want. It’s magnificent.”