Life
Pedro Coronel was born on March 25, 1922 in Jerez, Zacatecas to an upper middle class family.His mother played the violin and his father played the clarinet and violin. On Sundays they would get together and play folk music. The youngest of his brothers and sisters, Rafael, became a well known painter of Moors, monks and the elderly.
Pedro 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.
His interest in art led him to study at the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado "La Esmeralda" when he was only thirteen, when the school had teachers such as Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, Frida Kahlo and Francisco Zúñiga. Coronel forged friendships with Rivera, Zuñiga and Santos Balmori. He began by studying sculpture, but Santos Balmori’s influence encouraged him to paint. This led him to appreciate the uses of color.
As he began his art career, he visited Paris in 1946, deciding to make it his second home in the late 1940s through 1950s, dividing years half in Paris and half in Mexico City. In the 1960s, he was a teacher at La Esmeralda, residing mostly in Mexico but traveling frequently to Europe, Asian and the United States. During this time, he also worked with Mathias Goeritz, Rufino Tamayo and Pedro Friedeberg on the Hotel Camino Real in Mexico City.
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 “he who does not yell, he who does not tremble, had no right to live.” referring “life” in the sense of feeling. He said he feared death only because it would end his painting. He was considered to be a womanizer. He was married three times and had two daughters Luisa Jaina and Juana Lorenza with his first wife Amparo Dávila. He had one son, Martín Coronel, with his second wife Ana Teresa Ordiales and none with his third, Rejane Lalond.
Over his life, he amassed a large collection of pre Hispanic, African, Asian, Greco-Romano and Medieval art along with graphic art, with over 1,800 pieces from various places and times including Roman, Egyptian and Chinese works as well as art and handcrafts from Africa, the Mexican colonial period and works by Goya, Picasso, Miró and Chagall. This collection was exhibited shortly before Coronel’s death and public reaction to it prompted him to donate it to the Mexican people and since 1986 it has been part of the permanent collection of a museum named after him in Zacatecas.
Coronel died on May 23, 1985 in Mexico City. In 1986 his remains were moved to Zacatecas in accordance to his will, now at the Museo Pedro Coronel.
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