Fernando Botero, well-known for his sculptures and other artwork of Rubenesque figures has put on display in a NY art gallery a series of paintings "inspired" by the Abu Ghraib scandal.



Outraged by the news reports and the camera-phone images of shackled, beaten, naked prisoners sent around the world via the news media and the Internet, the 74-year-old Botero created a suite of about 45 protest paintings and drawings that are now on view at the Marlborough Gallery in New York.....

Few other artists have tackled the Abu Ghraib scandal, which is still unfolding, and Botero gets points for keeping the subject open for discussion, lest anyone forget. Clearly, he wants to join the ranks of Goya and Picasso, who captured the disasters and savagery of war with grandeur and gravity.

No word on when Botero will do a study on the brutality of hijacked airplanes, suicide bombers, which seem to me to be more in line with the civilian suffering immortalized in Picasso's Guernica.  Maybe those things don't produce outrage for him.

Some background on Guernica - On April 27th, 1937, unprecedented atrocities are perpetrated on behalf of Franco against the civilian population of a little Basque village in northern Spain. Chosen for bombing practice by Hitler's burgeoning war machine, the hamlet is pounded with high-explosive and incendiary bombs for over three hours. Townspeople are cut down as they run from the crumbling buildings. Guernica burns for three days. Sixteen hundred civilians are killed or wounded.

Abu Ghraib - same thing.  Panties on the head - savagery.  Isn't there enough horrible crap that goes on in Botero's own country of Colombia that can inspire him?  Maybe he could even bring attention to horrors that nobody knows about (or would that take courage?) instead of portraying something that every media outlet in the world did quite a nice job of already?