Footnotes

We are grateful to Dr. Salomón Grimberg for his assistance in cataloguing this work.

Provenance
(possibly) Julio G. Tejada Collection.
Acquired by the present owners in 1978 at the Mex-Art International Fair, La Jolla, California.


Sin título was painted by Pedro Coronel (1922-1985) in 1978. This late work in the artist's oeuvre is integral to what is considered the height of his artistic production, from 1949 to 1984. Sin título represents the apotheosis of Coronel's innovative utilization of color and stylized treatment of subject matter.

Coronel was born into an artistic, musical family and during his childhood in Jerez, Zacatecas, he was particularly fascinated by watching stone carving in a nearby quarry and observing a local puppet maker model faces for his creations out of clay. These formative experiences would pave the way for Coronel to pursue a career in the visual arts. In 1940, Coronel enrolled in the School of Sculpture and Direct Carving; his teachers were the sculptors Juan Cruz, Luis Ortiz Monasterio, Romulo Rozo, and Francisco Zuñiga.

In 1942, after a student strike in which Coronel participated, the school changed its name to Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado (National School of Painting, Sculpture and Engraving), known as "La Esmeralda." The curriculum was modified and a prestigious staff of educators and practicing artists joined, including Santos Balmori, Frida Kahlo, Agustin Lazo, Manuel Rodriguez Lozano, José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and Carlos Orozco Romero. From this influential group, Coronel forged close friendships with Balmori, Rivera, and Zuñiga in particular.

Coronel had begun his journey by studying sculpture, but Balmori encouraged him to focus on painting. He trained in the Mexican muralism tradition and became one of the most influential artists of the Generación de la Ruptura. He completed his studies in 1946 and stayed on one more year to teach a course in sculpture. Coronel was an accomplished sculptor, engraver, and painter – eventually the medium of paint took precedence for the artist.

Coronel visited Paris in 1946, and through the 1950s split his time between Paris and Mexico City. He traveled extensively in the 1960s throughout North America, Europe, and Asia, but continued to return to Mexico to teach at La Esmeralda. Early in his career he worked in Paris with Victor Brauner and Constantin Brâncuși. In 1956, Galería Proteo, Mexico City, organized Coronel's first solo exhibition. From then on, he would continue to exhibit in Mexico but also globally – in France, Italy, Brazil, and the United States.

Pedro Coronel was an avid collector, and over a lifetime of world travels he amassed a large collection of Pre-Hispanic, Mexican Colonial, African, Asian, Greco-Roman, and Medieval art alongside important works by artists such as Marc Chagall, Francisco Goya, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso. Although Coronel was an international traveler and object collector, the iconography of his paintings is primarily anchored in the indigenous motifs of his home country. Coronel's artistic creations recover the deepest roots of pre-Columbian Mexican heritage, and simultaneously evince the influence of modern avant-garde movements such as Cubism, Expressionism, and Orphism, coupled with primitivist synthesized forms of African and Asian cultures. Coronel's distinguished legacy is celebrated to this day at the Museo Pedro Coronel in the city of Zacatecas, where major artworks created by Coronel as well as objects selected from his private collection are harmoniously displayed, offering a rich and full understanding of Coronel as one of the most important artists of twentieth-century Central America.

Sin título was painted during a key decade for Coronel. In 1970, he returned to Mexico and presented an exhibition titled Year One Moon at the Museum of Modern Art. At that time, he also set up his studio at his home in San Jerónimo, Mexico City. In 1971, the monograph Pedro Coronel, Pintor y Escultor by Justino Fernández was published by the Institute of Aesthetic Research at UNAM. Coronel was involved in several major mural commissions around the time of painting Sin título: the murals at the International Labor Office, Geneva (1974) and in the Antonio Gálvez Aiza Center, Mexico City (1975); Don Quixote Cosmic in the Don Quixote Iconographic Museum, Mexico City (1978); and Murmullos de Jade in Seguros at América Banamex, Mexico City (1978).

In this monumentally scaled painting, Sin título, Coronel has described flattened, abstracted flora and fauna with a riot of bright, captivating color – jewel-tone fuchsias, reds, greens, and blues. Background and form are arranged into a bold jigsaw of pattern replete with native indigenous themes. A focus on pre-Hispanic colors and motifs are a hallmark of Coronel's body of work. He reinvented Mexican painting from its core, finding new ways to connect past and present. Coronel was very much immersed in the cutting-edge modern art discourse, and he applied international avant-garde concepts to the native and traditional.

Coronel completed two important murals in the same year Sin título was painted; these commissions as part of his unified artistic practice clearly inform the grand format and impressive scale of the painting. Sin título's remarkably pronounced texture was achieved both through impasto technique and by mixing sand into his oil paints. The effect on the surface of the work almost brings to mind the cracked terrain of a parched land. In the upper half of the composition, we can make out a blue lizard, pink and green elephant, and multi-colored snake. Coronel's oeuvre often references elements of violence similar to that of ancient Mesoamerican art. In Sin título, the threat of the serpent – with all its biblical, mythological, literal, and metaphorical significance – looms large. Crisp, muscular shapes create an energetic rhythm across the canvas. They are sculptural in their robustness, but not at all in terms of volumetric rendering. Forms of animals and plants give way to color and overall composition. Stripes and striations further emphasize the graphic quality of the painting and the flattened description of subject matter.

Sin título has an impeccable provenance; it was acquired in the same year it was executed, and has been cherished in the same private collection for over forty years. Completely fresh to market, the painting has not been publicly exhibited nor seen at auction since its acquisition. Display of the work is open to interpretation. Its present owners lived with and enjoyed Sin título displayed as a panoramic scene, hung horizontally; the painting is equally strong when installed vertically, evoking the totemic silhouette of an ancient monolith.