Emilio Baz Viaud

Baz Viaud was born in Mexico City in 1918. He studied architecture, reportedly at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, before turning to art, and entered the Academia de San Carlos in 1938 for formal art training. He went on to take courses at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plasticas and, more formatively, trained under Manuel Rodriguez Lozano, who is credited with giving him a strict artistic formation.

His early work drew notice within Mexico City's exhibition circuit: a 1943 portrait, Retrato de Silvia, shown at the IV Salon Anual de Pintura, was mentioned by the critic Justino Fernandez in the magazine Hoy in January 1944, and Baz Viaud took part in the major 1946 Exposicion Nacional de Artes Plasticas. During an extended stay in San Miguel de Allende, he received a gold medal and diploma for artistic merit from the Universidad de Guanajuato at the 1950 Exposicion de Bellas Artes at the Instituto Allende. He held his first solo exhibition in 1951, and in 1953 a work of his received an honorable mention at the 52nd Annual Exhibition of the Delgado Museum in New Orleans, one of his few documented showings outside Mexico. He won First Prize at the Salon de Invierno of the Salon de la Plastica Mexicana in both 1954 and 1955.

Later in his career, his work appeared in the 1984 group exhibition Siete Pintores at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, and in 1986 the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City presented a solo exhibition of eighty of his paintings under the title Banistas y alumbradas. Baz Viaud died in 1991; his work was included that same year in the Museo de Arte Moderno's exhibition Herencia y Creacion. Sources consistently place his life dates as 1918 to 1991 and his death in Mexico City, though no source located gives an exact birth date or an exact death date.

Modern recognition of Baz Viaud rests heavily on the Museo Coleccion Blaisten, whose holdings are described in academic sources as the most important surviving ensemble of his paintings, and on a 2018 UNAM graduate thesis, Emilio Baz Viaud: Retratos de una epoca, which reconstructs his exhibition history and collections. His earliest recorded critical notice came from Justino Fernandez, who referenced a 1943 portrait in the magazine Hoy in 1944, though the original text of that mention has not been located. No verbatim critical assessment of his work by a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile.

Baz Viaud's clearest documented auction result is Retrato de Nazario Chimez Barket, a 1952 portrait that sold at Sotheby's in New York on 19 November 2024 for USD 204,000, reportedly well above its estimate. Beyond this result, public auction activity for the artist is sparse and mostly concentrated in Latin American art sales at major houses; a figure attributed to the artist on one aggregator site could not be tied to a specific work, date, or sale, and has not been used here. No gallery or estate is currently documented as representing Baz Viaud or his work; his historical presence in the market runs through period exhibitions rather than ongoing representation. The bulk of his known holdings sit in Mexican museum collections rather than moving through frequent resale.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Baz Viaud; attribution and provenance should be checked against the Museo Coleccion Blaisten catalogue and the UNAM thesis, which together document his known works and exhibition history. His public auction record is extremely thin, effectively anchored by a single well-documented high sale on 19 November 2024, so collectors should treat that price as an isolated data point rather than a market trend. No gallery or estate currently represents him, and buyers should also be aware that some secondary sources render his surname as "Baz Vlaud," an orthographic variant of the same artist rather than a different person. The exact date of his death in 1991 is not confirmed in accessible major sources, though multiple sources place the death itself in Mexico City.