Alexander Corazzo was born in Lyon, France and originally studied music from 1918 to 1924. After arriving in the United States in 1927, he studied art at the St. Paul School of Art in Minnesota. Beginning around 1934, his work became abstract and non-objective and remained so throughout his career. In 1935 he became one of three Americans invited to join the famed European artists group Abstraction-Creation. His work was illustrated in at least one of the group's publications. In 1937, he attended Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's "New Bauhuas" in Chicago. He left after one year.

Corazzo was a member of the American Abstract Artists. He exhibited nationally throughout the 1930s and 1940s at museums including The Art Institute of Chicago, The San Francisco Museum of Art, The National Gallery of Art and The Santa Barbara Museum of Art. He was the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the University of Michigan Museum of Art in 1976. Corazzo was a close friend of John Cage who kindly contributed a poem dedicated to Corazzo for the publication, which accompanied the 1976 retrospective.