Piero Dorazio; Telegraph obit (painter)
Hyfler/Rosner
led the revival of Futurism and abstract painting in Italy
Telegraph
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http://www.galleria-incontro.it/dorazioreticolo66.htm
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PIERO DORAZIO, who died on Tuesday aged 77, was one of the
leading figures in modern painting in Italy, and responsible
for reviving the Futurist and Abstract movements.
Dorazio's work owed much to his early association in New
York with figures such as Clement Greenberg, the critic
responsible for promoting abstract expressionism, and with
leading practitioners in the field, such as Clyfford Still,
Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko. But Dorazio's own
paintings tended also to draw heavily on the techniques of
Concrete Art and the Futurists, and his later work was
centred on large pieces which created structural reductions
of form, particularly by utilising primary colour fields to
explore the decorative possibilities of linear and plane
compositions.
Piero D'Orazio (he dropped the apostrophe early in life) was
born on June 19 1927 in Rome and began painting during the
Second World War. In 1945, Dorazio began to study
architecture at the Universita degli Studi. He had also
begun to re-examine the Futurists, the movement launched in
1909 which enthusiastically embraced speed, noise, pollution
and other aspects of the 20th century.
With other like-minded artists, Dorazio founded the Gruppa
Arte Sociale the following year. In 1947, his Manifesto del
Formalismo, written with other members of the Forma 1 group,
argued against social realism and for the principles of
abstraction in art. The French government was impressed
enough to award him a scholarship to the Ecole des
Beaux-Arts, where he met the Cubist Georges Braque, and the
founders of Dada, Jean Arp and Francis Picabia.
Dorazio returned to Rome in 1948, where he became involved
in staging the Art Club Internazionale series of exhibitions
which, along with the gallery Age d'Or, promoted the
international tradition of the avant-garde. By this stage he
had abandoned his architectural studies to devote himself to
painting and sculpture, and wrote La Fantasia dell'Arte
nella Vita Moderna (1955), the first book dealing with the
international modern tradition to appear in Italy. In 1953,
Dorazio had accepted an invitation to attend a seminar at
Harvard, and remained in America for most of the next year,
becoming friends with many of the principal figures in the
abstract expressionist movement, and staging his own first
one-man exhibition. It was followed the next year by
another, at the Rose Fried Gallery. In July 1954, he
returned to Rome, and two years later participated in the
Venice Biennale; by this stage he was also showing regularly
in groups and working extensively in ceramics.
Monochromatic paintings in the late 1950s were followed by a
solo exhibition at the Biennale, and Dorazio was also
appointed director of the department of painting, sculpture
and graphic art at the University of Pennsylvania. He
continued to teach there until 1970.
Firmly established as Italy's leading abstract modernist,
Dorazio had a number of significant exhibitions, often with
the Marlborough Gallery (in Rome, New York and London) as
well as shows at the Museum of Modern Art in New York
(1965), and with the Zero Group in Dusseldorf; he curated
the 1970 Venice Biennale.
From 1974, he worked from Todi in Umbria, and also became
art critic of Corriere della Sera. He had major touring
exhibitions in 1979, and in Japan in 1985, but refused to
take part in the Royal Academy's Italian Art in the 20th
Century in 1989.
He produced mosaics and a large window in Rome, and won many
awards, including the Michelangelo Prize. Valencia held a
major retrospective in 2003. His last exhibition was at
Achim Moeller Fine Art in New York last year.
An elegant bon vivant, fond of wine and women, Piero Dorazio
is survived by a son from his marriage to Virginia Dortch,
and two daughters by his second wife Giuliani.