Pedro Coronel was a Mexican painter, sculptor and printmaker. He evolved from realism to abstract forms. He was a part of the Generación de la Ruptura, bringing innovation into Mexican art in the mid 20th century.
Background
Mr. Coronel was born in Jerez, Zacatecas, Mexico, on March 25, 1922, to an upper-middle-class family. Coronel's parents were musicians. His mother played the violin and his father played the clarinet and violin. The youngest of his brothers and sisters, Rafael, became a well-known painter of Moors, monks and the elderly.
Education
Pedro Coronel was a restless child, a dreamer and very rebellious. He did not like school, often skipping classes taking twelve years to finish his primary education. Instead, he preferred to go to the quarry and watch the workers carve out pieces of stone from the mountain. As a boy, he collected tops, marbles and puppets. This hobby would later evolve into a large collection of art from various parts of the world.
Pedro Coronel studied painting and sculpture in Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado "La Esmeralda" from 1940 to 1945 under Juan Cruz, Francisco Zúñiga and Santos Balmori and was later a teacher there himself.
From 1947 and until the 1960s, Mr. Coronel lived in Paris, where he became friends with the German painter Leo Breuer and the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi, both mature and established artists. The work of Brancusi no doubt greatly influenced this artist. Its essentialist nature, which led him to represent reality through pure, absolute, forms which is often connected with the primitive art, can be reflected in the first work of Colonel, but, above all, in the work of maturity developed in Mexico. His paintings of the European period, still figurative, already denote abstract vocation in the treatment of the figure by means of juxtaposed planes. Tireless traveler, he toured Europe and North Africa before returning permanently to their country.
He belonged to a generation of painters that viewed the consumation of the Mexican Renaissance with mural painting. His first individual exhibition was in the Galería Proteo in 1954. Later he exhibited in France, Italy, Japan, the United States and Brazil.
Back in Mexico, Pedro Coronel faced the powerful visual their country's culture and artistic events that were being developed. It is true that he had never lost contact; in his Parisian years he traveled several times to his land and frequented the circles of Mexican intellectuals who lived in Paris, as well as participating in exhibitions, which earned him some recognition before their turn. His work underwent a great change; introduced, in part, the abstract imagery of pre-Columbian art and began to alternate the painting with sculpture. His work of the 1970s is a mature work that brings together the essentialist view of art acquired in Europe with the mixed culture of his country. He did not lose his love of travel and, in the 1960s, returned numerous times to Paris, he visited Japan and Rome and toured the United States and Canada.
In addition to painting easel and the sculpture, which practiced in a second term and in which, possibly under the powerful influence of Brancusi, pre-Columbian aesthetics is not appreciated, he made some wall paintings as well as graphic work.
Pedro Coronel has been characterized as having a strong and sometimes violent personality as well as making curt responses. However, he has also been characterized as honest and fair. He said, the only reason he feared death was that it would end his painting.
Interests
collecting of pre Hispanic, African, Asian, Greco-Romano and Medieval art along with graphic art
Connections
Pedro Coronel was briefly married to Amparo Dávila, a Mexican writer. Then he had his long-term eighteen-year relation with his second wife, Réjane Lalonde.