Piero Dorazio (NY Times)
Hyfler/Rosner
Piero Dorazio, Italian Painter With a Geometric Eye, Dies at
77
By KEN JOHNSON
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.
Invited to teach in a summer program at Harvard University
in 1953, Mr. Dorazio stayed in the United States for a year
and befriended Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Robert
Rauschenberg, Helen Frankenthaler and other New York
artists, as well as the critic Clement Greenberg.
He returned to teach from 1961 to 1969 at the Graduate
School of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania.
Around that time he helped found the university's Institute
of Contemporary Art. In 1970 he returned to Italy and took
up residence in Todi.
Mr. Dorazio was represented in numerous international
exhibitions, including the 1952 Venice Biennale, before
having his first one-person exhibition at Wittenborn
One-Wall Gallery in New York in 1953.
In 1965 he was included in the famous exhibition "The
Responsive Eye" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
During the 1970's he exhibited regularly at the André
Emmerich Gallery. The Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de
Paris mounted a retrospective of his work in 1979, and in
1980 the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo organized a
traveling retrospective.
Mr. Dorazio's marriages to Virginia Dortch Dorazio and
Giuliana Dorazio ended in divorce. He is survived by a son
from his first marriage, Justin Dorazio of New York, and two
daughters from his second marriage, Angela and Allegra, both
of Rome.