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Lot Essay
This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity signed by Martín Coronel, dated 27 March 2018.
An inventive painter and sculptor, Pedro Coronel was known for his potent and visually dazzling body of work throughout his prolific career in his native Mexico and abroad. Although Coronel’s vibrant modernity was influenced by his deep Mexican roots, he did not subscribe to the socially committed dogma that was the status quo for the nationalist arts project from the 1920s onward. Instead, he carefully mapped out his complex compositions, relished the colors of his country in all their manifestations and carved a place for his work in a land with rich traditions, great artists and a constant desire for creative renewal. His generation would break with the muralist legacy and forge ahead with a truly modernist idiom expressed within the context of an international vanguard which began to emerge at the start of the 1950s.
Coronel received his professional training at the National School of Painting, Sculpture and Graphic Arts known as “La Esmeralda” in Mexico City from 1939 to 1942. “La Esmeralda” was under the direction of artist Antonio Ruíz (El corcito) and Coronel’s teachers were Juan Cruz and Francisco Zúñiga. Since its founding in 1927 as part of the Secretaría de Educación, the school sought to provide its students contacts with renowned professionals. Among those who taught and lectured at the institution were Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Carlos Orozco Romero, José Clemente Orozco, and others. For the young Coronel, the connections he made through his teachers were vital to his artistic formation.
In 1946 and almost against the advice of one of his mentors, Diego Rivera, Coronel made a first trip to Paris which so profoundly marked him that he would spend half the year living in the French capital and the rest in his native home from 1950 to 1960. In Europe he began in earnest to trust his instincts as an artist and reflect on all that was possible and indeed, essential for a modernist painter to consider beyond the formal qualities of his production such as his own personal and spiritual philosophies. In Paris, he met and worked with such artists as Constantin Brancusi, Victor Brauner, and Serge Poliakoff among others. However, Coronel was greatly shaped and drawn to the work of Mexico’s most international modernist, Rufino Tamayo whom he referred to as “…the dreamer of all things poetic in this country.”1
Painted in 1975, La Tamayana is a fond tribute to a great visual poet from a younger colleague who was also a gifted colorist and teller of myths. Coronel’s lyric homage to one of Tamayo’s favorite themes—sandías, is fresh and original, surrealistic and abstract, and absolutely rooted in all that is Mexican. Mexico is magical and mythical—its ancient cities and cultures are replete with fierce gods and noble heroes; its remarkably fantastic landscape is dotted with deserts and volcanoes, and its rich fields provide the bounty to feed a nation with fruits of outrageous colors and an abundance of exquisite flowers to adorn it; all these attributes endow this vast land with awe and wonderment. “In Tamayo, we the younger Mexican painters, found a new escape door and the road to the infinite,” Coronel mused admiringly about his fellow compatriot.
Margarita Aguilar, Doctoral Candidate, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
An inventive painter and sculptor, Pedro Coronel was known for his potent and visually dazzling body of work throughout his prolific career in his native Mexico and abroad. Although Coronel’s vibrant modernity was influenced by his deep Mexican roots, he did not subscribe to the socially committed dogma that was the status quo for the nationalist arts project from the 1920s onward. Instead, he carefully mapped out his complex compositions, relished the colors of his country in all their manifestations and carved a place for his work in a land with rich traditions, great artists and a constant desire for creative renewal. His generation would break with the muralist legacy and forge ahead with a truly modernist idiom expressed within the context of an international vanguard which began to emerge at the start of the 1950s.
Coronel received his professional training at the National School of Painting, Sculpture and Graphic Arts known as “La Esmeralda” in Mexico City from 1939 to 1942. “La Esmeralda” was under the direction of artist Antonio Ruíz (El corcito) and Coronel’s teachers were Juan Cruz and Francisco Zúñiga. Since its founding in 1927 as part of the Secretaría de Educación, the school sought to provide its students contacts with renowned professionals. Among those who taught and lectured at the institution were Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Carlos Orozco Romero, José Clemente Orozco, and others. For the young Coronel, the connections he made through his teachers were vital to his artistic formation.
In 1946 and almost against the advice of one of his mentors, Diego Rivera, Coronel made a first trip to Paris which so profoundly marked him that he would spend half the year living in the French capital and the rest in his native home from 1950 to 1960. In Europe he began in earnest to trust his instincts as an artist and reflect on all that was possible and indeed, essential for a modernist painter to consider beyond the formal qualities of his production such as his own personal and spiritual philosophies. In Paris, he met and worked with such artists as Constantin Brancusi, Victor Brauner, and Serge Poliakoff among others. However, Coronel was greatly shaped and drawn to the work of Mexico’s most international modernist, Rufino Tamayo whom he referred to as “…the dreamer of all things poetic in this country.”1
Painted in 1975, La Tamayana is a fond tribute to a great visual poet from a younger colleague who was also a gifted colorist and teller of myths. Coronel’s lyric homage to one of Tamayo’s favorite themes—sandías, is fresh and original, surrealistic and abstract, and absolutely rooted in all that is Mexican. Mexico is magical and mythical—its ancient cities and cultures are replete with fierce gods and noble heroes; its remarkably fantastic landscape is dotted with deserts and volcanoes, and its rich fields provide the bounty to feed a nation with fruits of outrageous colors and an abundance of exquisite flowers to adorn it; all these attributes endow this vast land with awe and wonderment. “In Tamayo, we the younger Mexican painters, found a new escape door and the road to the infinite,” Coronel mused admiringly about his fellow compatriot.
Margarita Aguilar, Doctoral Candidate, The Graduate Center, City University of New York