Botero: A really big shoe

The Botero show may be the biggest that has ever loaded into the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. It's also the heaviest.

"We've never brought anything in of this mammoth proportion," says Charlie Snyder, spokesman for the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Museum.

"We had to get the forklift up here," he says.

Snyder stands in front of the sphinxlike "Smoking Woman" (1987), a 4,000-pound bronze sculpture that's the tacit linchpin for "The Baroque World of Fernando Botero."

The traveling exhibition, which opens with a reception Friday, features 13 sculptures (all but three scaled for the average living room) and 87 paintings and drawings, all from Botero's personal collection. It's the only Colorado stop for the show, and only one of 13 appearances in the United States.

Based on auction sales, the work represented here is worth in the neighborhood of $15 million.

"Even in harsh economic times," says FAC curator Tariana Navas-Nieves, "Botero still sells very well."

All around El Pomar Gallery are big paintings in even bigger crates. They have to become acclimatized before the crew can open them up and start hanging them. Snyder gestures to the massive lady.

"We had about 3/8 of an inch to angle the crate into the elevator," he says of the museum's oversize lift. "As the forklift slipped the forks under the crate, (the crate) pushed back and I thought, "Great, now Saskia (Kesners, the registrar) will be squashed to death."

Planks eased the giant package out of the elevator, but as the forklift made its way across the wood gallery floor, it made a kind of crunching sound, Snyder says.

"It was like something out of ‘The Terminator.' And I'm thinking, ‘What is it doing to the floors?'"

It turned out that besides a little gash in a wall, everything was just fine.

"We had all this planned a year ago," says Navas-Nieves, referring to the placement of all the works, including the paintings and drawings. "We had it down to the day it was coming. We knew the dimensions. We had to know."

And not only did the small crew have to get the crate from the elevator to the correct spot on the gallery floor, but it had to uncrate it, tie the actual sculpture with straps and then lift it so that the bottom supports could be removed. And it's not as if these all came with bilingual instructions or anything, Snyder says, laughing.

A chubby, nearly 9-foot-tall bronze called "The Hand" (1985) had about a half an inch to spare to make it through the doors and in an alcove at the top of one of the stairs. It's one of two 2,000-pound bronzes in the exhibition.

"We wanted people to turn around and then, boom, they'd be facing this huge hand," Navas-Nieves says, smiling like a child who's mastered a new trick.

It's more than worth it, she says.

For those who know his work, they will be astounded by the show, Navas-Nieves says.

For those who don't, well, they'll be amazed, too.