Woman Smocking a Cigarette

The exaggerated voluptuousness of this nude woman, prone on a sheet and smoking a cigarette, expresses all the sensuality and vitality of the body in monumental form. This sculpture’s originality lies in the artist’s highly personal use of volume. Despite her weight, the figure gives a distinct impression of lightness, litheness, and grace. When asked why his figures are fat, Botero replied: “My figures, fat? No. They have volume. It’s magical, it’s sensual. And that’s what I love: rediscovering the volume that contemporary art has totally forgotten.”
The sculpture was acquired by the Principality in 1989.

Fernando Botero is a Colombian painter and sculptor, born in 1932 in Medellin. He lives and works between Paris, Colombia, New York, Monaco, and Tuscany. His first drawings were inspired by Pre-Colombian art, and by the works of Mexican muralists such as Diego Rivera. During his travels in Europe, he studied classical works, those of Vélasquez and Goya in Madrid, Ingres in Paris, and the Renaissance artists in Florence. In 1957, with the painting Still Life With Mandolin, the artist discovered for the first time how to dilate forms and exaggerate volumes. It would become his signature style. In 1960, he moved to New York where he won the Guggenheim International Award for his painting Battle of the Arch-Devil and the New York Museum of Modern Art purchased Mona Lisa, Age Twelve in 1961. Botero’s unusual style earned him worldwide recognition. His preferred subjects are still lives, female nudes, family portraits, bullfighting scenes, and tableaux of Colombian everyday life.
In the 1970s, he moved to Paris where he began sculpting bronze. For Botero, sculpture is the natural extension of his pictorial practice. The three-dimensional form gives his larger-than-life figures their full power, their voluptuous shapes becoming palpable and offering what the artist calls a “poetic alternative to reality”. His sculptures have been exhibited in Florence in 1991, on the Champs-Élysées in Paris in 1992, and on New York’s Park Avenue in 1993. Some are also installed in public spaces in Lisbon, Madrid, Munich, Singapore, and Tokyo. Fernando Botero died on the 15 September 2023 at the age of 91.