The Presidential Family

A stout president stands with his equally rotund family - wife, child, a bishop, a general, society matrons - all puffed into balloon-like roundness and posed with mock solemnity before a volcano. Fernando Botero inflates everyone and everything into his signature voluminous forms, gently satirizing the pomp and self-importance of the Latin American ruling class. Now in the Museum of Modern Art, the Presidential Family is among his best-known works - power, wealth, church, and military lined up like a swollen official portrait, the comedy of the bloated figures carrying a quiet, pointed political bite.