Alexander Corazzo

b. 1908, Lyon, France
d. 1971, Valpariaso, Indiana  

Alexander Corazzo was born in 1908 in Lyon, France, and originally studied music at the Conservatoire Nationale de Musique in Paris. In 1927, Corazzo moved to the United States to study art at the St. Paul School of Art in Minnesota, where his work became increasingly abstract and geometric. He was a member of the American Abstract Artists group, exhibiting nationally with them throughout the 1930s and 1940s, and was one of the few American artists asked to join the European group, Abstraction-Création. During this period, Corazzo also exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. 

In 1937, Corazzo attended the New Bauhaus in Chicago and developed an interest in architecture. He went on to study architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology under Mies Van Der Rohe and practiced architecture until his death in 1971. Five years after his death, the University of Michigan Museum of Art held a retrospective of Corazzo’s work, highlighting his contributions to abstraction and the avant-garde.