Pedro Coronel valuation
Mexican modernist who put pre-Hispanic form into abstraction, and collected obsessively.
Pedro Coronel was born at Jerez in Zacatecas in the early 1920s and trained at La Esmeralda in Mexico City before spending the early 1950s in Paris, where he worked with Brancusi and Ossip Zadkine and absorbed European abstraction.
What a work by Pedro Coronel is worth
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Bio
Pedro Coronel was born at Jerez in Zacatecas in the early 1920s and trained at La Esmeralda in Mexico City before spending the early 1950s in Paris, where he worked with Brancusi and Ossip Zadkine and absorbed European abstraction. What he did with it was particular to Mexico: dense, saturated colour and forms drawn from pre-Hispanic sculpture and popular art, in painting, in sculpture, and in monumental murals and stained glass. He was also a formidable collector, and the museum bearing his name in Zacatecas houses the enormous holding of world art he assembled and gave to his home state. He died in 1985; his brother Rafael was also a significant painter.
This is principally a Mexican and Latin American market, with the strongest results in Mexico City and in New York's Latin American sales. Oils on canvas are the core, led by the large abstract compositions of the 1960s and 1970s. Sculpture in bronze exists in editions and should be identified by cast number and foundry. Coronel also produced lithographs, and mixed-media works on paper are plentiful. Because much of the value rests on the intensity of the colour, past varnishing, surface dirt and light exposure are worth assessing carefully.
La Esmeralda, Paris and the museum in Zacatecas
Coronel entered La Esmeralda at thirteen, when its teachers included Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, Frida Kahlo and Francisco Zúñiga. He first went to Paris in 1946 and through the late 1940s and 1950s divided his time between Paris and Mexico City, and in the 1960s he taught at La Esmeralda. He belonged to the Generación de la Ruptura.
He won the National Painting Prize in 1959. His collection of more than 1,800 works, from pre-Hispanic, African, Asian, classical and medieval art to prints, is in the Museo Pedro Coronel in Zacatecas, where his remains were moved in 1986, the year after his death in Mexico City.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
