Francisco Corzas

Francisco Corzas Chavez was born on October 4, 1936, in Mexico City. He trained at La Esmeralda, the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado, from 1951 to 1955, then moved to Italy in 1956, where he studied fresco painting at the Accademia San Giacomo in Rome and nude and figure drawing at the Accademia di Belle Arti. His work won a silver medal at the Via Margutta International Fair in Rome in 1958, an early sign of the international attention his figurative style would attract.

Back in Mexico, Corzas built a steady exhibition record through the 1960s, showing at Galeria Misrachi in 1962 and Galeria Juan Martin in 1967, and he received the First Acquisition Prize at Salon 65, staged by the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, in 1965. He was also associated with the Salon de la Plastica Mexicana. By 1972 his standing was confirmed by a museum retrospective, Francisco Corzas, 1962 to 1972, at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, followed by a solo presentation at the Museo de Arte Moderno in 1976.

Corzas painted the nude repeatedly across his career, in dark, academically grounded compositions. He died in Mexico City on September 15, 1983, at age 47, after a three-year illness reported by gallery biographies as pneumonia. Posthumous tributes followed, including a 1984 homage at La Galeria Metropolitana of the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana and a 1998 group homage at the Centro Cultural San Angel with fellow painters Jose Luis Cuevas, Rafael Coronel, Javier Juarez, and Raymundo Sesma.

Corzas is consistently framed as a leading figure of the Generacion de la Ruptura, the group of Mexican painters who turned from muralism toward a more introspective, expressionist figuration. His treatment of the nude, revisited across his career, is the aspect of his work most often singled out by critics and dealers describing his style.

Corzas's public auction market is thin and incompletely documented. Sotheby's reporting on its Latin American Art auction describes Desnudo (Fleur du mal) selling for USD 218,500, a new record for the artist at the time; the exact sale date and location are not confirmed in public sources. Heritage Auctions separately lists its own in-house record for the artist, El Toro y sus Amigos (1964), which sold for USD 2,629 on December 7, 2007, a small fraction of the Sotheby's figure. Dealer summaries suggest some other sales above USD 50,000, but a complete, ranked list of his top public results is not available. His secondary market runs through major auction houses alongside Mexico City dealers including LS Galeria and Inverarte Art Gallery.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Francisco Corzas, so provenance and dealer verification, rather than a formal authentication body, carry most of the weight in confirming a work. His auction record is built on very few high-value transactions rather than a deep, continuous sales history, which means a single result, such as the reported USD 218,500 sale of Desnudo (Fleur du mal), can sit far above the bulk of his public market. His paintings' presence in the Museo de Arte Moderno and Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil in Mexico City, and in Vatican collections, is the strongest evidence of his lasting institutional standing.