Ángel Botello

Biography

Botello’s father died in 1918, when the boy was five; the family ran a fish-canning business in Galicia. In the 1920s it went bankrupt, and his mother moved with the children to Bordeaux. Ángel wanted to become an architect, while his mother saw him as a farmer. With his younger brother Manuel he spent four years at the École des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux, where they studied drawing, painting and modelling.

In 1935 Botello returned to Spain and, on a scholarship, entered the San Fernando Academy in Madrid. The few early paintings that survive, French and Spanish, show a quick move away from strict academic training towards the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists.

A year later the Civil War began. He left his studies and joined the Republican army, where he served as a cartographer; Manuel fought beside him and was killed at the front. After Franco’s victory in 1939 it was impossible to stay in Spain. Botello went back to France, to his family, who were then living in a refugee camp, and soon they all left for the Dominican Republic. Dominican artists took him into their circle, and his work of that time was shown at the Latin American art exhibition at the Riverside Museum (1940). That same year the family spent eight months in Cuba.

In 1944, after his return to Santo Domingo, the Peruvian ambassador noticed his paintings and invited him to show them in Port-au-Prince. In Haiti Botello met Christiane Auguste, who became his wife and artistic manager. He had planned to go to Mexico to see Diego Rivera, but after the marriage he stayed. Many consider his Haitian landscapes and figure studies his best work; it was also there that he began carving wood.

In 1953 the family moved to San Juan. They opened their first gallery in the Caribe Hilton Hotel and a second one later in Old San Juan. The light and bright colours of the tropics, he said, opened a new world for him. From the 1960s his main subject was his three children. In 1959 he travelled to Ravenna to study mosaic, made a few works and soon dropped it, believing he had mastered the technique. He turned to printmaking in the 1960s, when a dealer reproduced his paintings without his involvement; Botello refused to sign those prints and went to Paris to learn lithography and serigraphy himself. Linocuts also survive. He worked as a photographer and a caricaturist as well.

The Puerto Rican years, thirty-three of his seventy-three, are regarded as the most productive in the number of works and the variety of techniques. The figures of this period are partly caricatured, especially the girls, and in Puerto Rico the manner is known as the “Botellian style”. In the early 1980s he pursued painting and sculpture side by side. In the last year of his life he made twenty-two large bronzes.

Botello died in San Juan on 11 November 1986. His former house in Old San Juan is now a gallery. In 1987 his work was shown at Sotheby’s in New York, and in 1990 at Christie’s in London.