Francisco Corzas

Biography

In Rome, in the Trastevere district, Corzas considered his real school to be not an academy but the three years he spent in museums. These words are hard to verify, but they look plausible in his painting: his canvases show women in old gowns and wide hats, as if they had stepped out of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century pictures.

He was born on 4 October 1936 in Mexico City, the youngest of eight children. His parents, Enrique Corzas and Regina Chávez, were musicians from Quecholac in the state of Puebla. He grew up in Tepito, and friends called him Pancho. The family was very poor, and the boy dreamed of becoming a bullfighter or a boxer. He made his first drawings with pieces of coal on the bathroom wall.

At fourteen, with his mother’s support, he enrolled at La Esmeralda, the National School of Painting, Sculpture and Engraving in Mexico City, and studied there from 1951 to 1955. His teachers were Agustín Lazo, Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, Carlos Orozco Romero, María Izquierdo and Juan Soriano. There it also turned out that he had a strong baritone voice. With Felipe Zaúl Peña and Raúl Anguiano he formed the Trio La Esmeralda and sang at student parties. Singing later paid his way more than once in Europe. In 1956, at nineteen, Corzas went to Italy with Humberto Kubli. Kubli soon went back, but Corzas stayed in Rome. He studied fresco painting at the Accademia San Giacomo and figure drawing at the Brera Academy in Milan, travelled around Europe and earned money by singing. He admired Correggio, Veronese, Tintoretto, Velázquez and above all Goya. Some of his early works he signed with the pseudonym “Goya”. He described his painting as impressionism with a strong influence from Goya, while critics have often classed it as expressionism.

His first solo exhibition took place in 1958 at the YMCA in Rome, followed by one at the Trentadue Gallery in Milan. That same year, at the Via Margutta International Fair in Rome, he won a silver medal, and he was noticed for the first time outside Mexico. He also took part in competitions in Oslo, in Frenchen (Germany) and in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Corzas returned to Mexico in 1962. The first period was hard: his work was not yet appreciated. He first showed it at the Antonio Souza Gallery, but his real debut was an exhibition of large figurative canvases at the Galería Misrachi that same year. Later he received an honourable mention from the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana and became a member. In 1964 he won the first Acquisition Prize at the Salón 65 of the National Institute of Fine Arts. In 1967, in Italy, he met Bianca Dall’Occa, who later followed him to Mexico; they stayed together until his death.

In the 1970s he again lived and worked in Europe. The French government granted him a scholarship, and he spent a year at the Bramsen workshop in Paris, then travelled through several European countries. At the Caprina Graphics workshop in Rome he made ten lithographs, “Los Profetas”, at the Upiglio workshop in Milan one, “Umbrío por la pena”, and for the Olivetti workshop eleven lithographs on the theme of the “Carmina Burana”. For the Vatican he painted two canvases: “Profeta” (Room 12) and “Plegaria” (the Stampa Room). The New York publisher Lublin Press commissioned ten lithographs, and another commission came from the Fundación Cultural Televisa: the work “Agonías y otras ofrendas”.

He did not use models for his work: he invented the faces or based them on stories he had read, and in many figures one can recognise his own features. The early pictures show mutilated bodies and ghostlike faces in streams of light, with orange predominating. Later the main subject became sensual female nudes, sad and beautiful, among faded colours that hint at a bed or a shawl. Owls, bulls, cats and especially horses often appear beside the women. He left backgrounds and forms undefined and reduced his palette to yellow, dark ochre and black. He always painted with a drink in his hand, with operatic arias playing at full volume, and kept several works going at once.

In all he had fourteen solo exhibitions and took part in forty-three group shows, from Rome, Florence and Venice to Belgrade, Prague, New Delhi, Osaka, New York and Buenos Aires. In 1972 a retrospective, “Francisco Corzas, 1962–1972”, was held at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, and in 1976 a solo exhibition at the Museo de Arte Moderno.

For the last three years he worked almost without pause, even at night. His last painting, “La modelo”, was made in the final days of his life. Corzas died in Mexico City on 15 September 1983, aged forty-six. In 1998 a tribute to his memory was held at the Centro Cultural San Ángel, with José Luis Cuevas, Rafael Coronel, Javier Juárez and Raymundo Sesma taking part. Corzas’s works are in the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico (“La Empaquetada”, 1966), the Museo Carrillo Gil and the Fundación Cultural Televisa, while a good part is abroad, in museums and private collections.