Piero Dorazio, 77; One of the Fathers of Italian Abstract Painting
NY Times
Piero Dorazio, a celebrated Italian abstract painter and an important innovator of Modernism in that country, died on Tuesday in a hospital in Perugia, near his home in Todi, Umbria. He was 77. The cause was complications of diabetes, said his dealer in New York, Achim Moeller.
Mr. Dorazio started exploring abstraction in the late 1940’s and in the late 1950’s began to create all-over meshes of colored lines. During the next decade, like the American Color Field painters who also came into their own in the 1960’s, Mr. Dorazio produced expansive paintings that asserted vivid color and simplified, often geometrically ordered design. For the rest of his career, he would continue to work with the tension between lyrical sensuality and formalist rigor.
Piero D’Orazio was born on June 29, 1927. in Rome. He began painting and drawing as a teenager and after World War II began associating and exhibiting with other young and progressive artists, including those in Forma 1, the first group of Italian abstract artists.
In 1947 he received a French government grant to live in Paris, where he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts. During a yearlong stay, he met Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Francis Picabia and other leading lights of the French art world. Back in Rome, Mr. Dorazio organized Modern art exhibitions and wrote art criticism. In 1950 he helped found L’Age d’Or, an artists’ cooperative gallery, and in 1955 he published “La Fantasia Dell-Arte Nella Vita Moderna,” the first book on international Modern art to appear in Italy.
See also Piero Dorazio memorabilia.
Piero Dorazio, a retrospective: An exhibition
The work of Piero Dorazio
Piero Dorazio: paintings 1965-1968
Piero Dorazio: Paintings of the fifties
Piero Dorazio, paintings and collages 1971-1972: [catalogue of an exhibition held at the Marlborough Gallery], February 1973
