Fernando Botero, Latin America's best-known living artist, shocked the art world last year...
Forty-eight paintings and sketches - of naked prisoners attacked by dogs, dangling from ropes, beaten by guards, in a mangled heap of bodies - will be exhibited in Rome at the Palazzo Venezia museum on June 16...
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Well, not very compelling. The deeper problem is that modern figurative work of all kinds usually begins with the graphic premise of the de-humanization of the human figure, which is what abstraction often signifies. Once that foundation is set, then the work, whatever it depicts can not overcome the premise to explore much else. The trick, and it is mostly a trick in the sense of a pictorial device, is to begin with a different premise.
To protest inhumanity, the painter has to begin with a less destructive foundation and then set up the contrast of the depiction with its foundation. To see how this works, consider the difference between Kathy Kolowitz and George Grosz. Both are expressionists, roughly contemporaries, both outraged at their society, both predominately graphic artists. Kolowitz is far the more compelling and powerful of the two, because she begins with a deeply grounded humanism---the most sympathetic of all figures, the mother and child, the beaten industrial worker, the hard hands and lives of rural labor. Build on this foundation her darker imagery becomes some of the most striking and powerful of the entire genre. Grosz on the other hand starts off with the pictorial plane of shattered glass and makes his points on the absurd and comedic plane, with a truly jarring and psychotic cacophony of cartoon figures mixed with their ridiculous poses, symbols, and pretenses---all falling like tinkling shards of glass. Different worlds.
For a less striking difference, but along the same lines you can set up a formally related distinction between Rivera and Orozco. Rivera because of his formalism or formulary can not reach the same emotive impact that Orozco can.
Fernando Botero's cartoon-like chubby figures fall into the Grosz camp. Meanwhile his figurative formalism along the didactic lines of Rivera seems ambiguous in its ability to compel outrage at the fantastically grotesque absurdity of the US military's grim work at Abu Ghraib. On the other hand, perhaps because of the utterly gratuitous brutality of Abu Ghraib, maybe Botero's treatment is more appropriate.
In any event, let's not forget Abu Ghraib is still open for business, working night and day to make Iraq safe for Democracy with Rice, Gonzales, Negreponti, and Bolton heading up our efforts.
CG