Cal could be permanent home for controversial Abu Ghraib paintings

[caligirl]

Source: San Francisco Chronicle



If the details can be worked out, Colombian artist Fernando Botero's potent Abu Ghraib paintings will find a permanent home at UC Berkeley, where the controversial images were shown last winter.

Latin America's most celebrated living artist, Botero has offered to give the university all the pictures it displayed - 25 big paintings and 22 drawings of bound, bloodied and blindfolded naked prisoners, one pawed by a ferocious dog. They're based on the photographs and stories of Iraqi prisoners tortured by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Berkeley chancellor Robert Birgeneau has tentatively agreed to accept the gift, the monetary value of which experts peg at $10 million to $15 million.

"We have a gentleman's agreement," said Birgeneau, who saw the works when the exhibition opened at Cal's Doe Library in January and was impressed by "their emotional impact and technical brilliance. I've written the artist saying we'll accept them, subject to us being able to work out a reasonable set of conditions."

Those conditions include how many of the works would be on permanent view and how they'd be loaned to other institutions. Botero, who is famous for the bloated figures in his playfully satiric paintings that now fetch $1 million to $2 million at auction, has said he would never sell the jarring Abu Ghraib pictures, which were first shown in Europe in 2005. He turned down an offer from the Kunsthalle Wurth museum near Stuttgart, Germany, to build a wing to house them.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/08/28/MN81RQ651.DTL

[Omaha Steve]

1. How could we as good guys do this?

Show the world what we as a country should be very ashamed of! Not the paintings, but the actions our elected officials endorsed.

[Judi Lynn]

2. Very, very interesting. Can't guarantee the safety of the paintings, however!

You could really expect to see a Watergate-like break in, and complete destruction of the paintings. Obviously, no one in the Republican Party wants the world to even know what has been done, intentionally, to people who got in their road.

You can find more by Botero at google images. Here's a quick link to his Abu Ghraib paintings:
http://images.google.com/images?sourceid=navclient&aq=t&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLD,GGLD:2004-37,GGLD:en&q=Fernando+Botero+Abu+Ghraib



He's a man who sees this a very serious, in a country
where this government has enabled and supported mass murders,
and murders of union workers, human rights workers, "leftists"
at the hands of death squads which have always worked as the
visible arm of the Colombian U.S. taxpayer supported military.

[Judi Lynn]

3. Viva Fernando Botero! He's got true courage to stand up against these atrocities so publicly.

[David__77]

4. I think the article makes a leap in calling them "controversial."

The article does nothing to indicate controversy. The reservation could just as easily be concerning artistic style. I think that's a weakness of the journalism in this article.