Piero Dorazio (1927 – 2005) was born in Rome. He began painting as a teenager and after World War II, he began exhibiting with other young and progressive artists, including those in Forma 1, the first group of Italian abstract artists. In 1947 Dorazio enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he met Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Francis Picabia and other leading French artists during his yearlong stay. When he returned to Rome, Dorazio organized Modern art exhibitions, wrote art criticism and in 1950 helped found L’Age d’Or, an artists’ cooperative gallery. In 1955 Dorazio published “La Fantasia Dell-Arte Nella Vita Moderna”, the first book on international Modern art to appear in Italy. In 1953, he was invited to teach in a summer program at Harvard University, and Dorazio stayed in the United States for a year befriending Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Robert Rauschenberg, Helen Frankenthaler and other New York artists. Dorazio returned to the United States in 1961 where he taught at the Guaduate School of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania, where he helped found the university’s Institute of Contemporary art. In 1970, Dorazio returned to Todi, Italy. During his life, Dorazio was represented in numerous international exhibitions, including the 1952 Venice Biennale, and the well known exhibition in 1965 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York called “The Responsive Eye”. Dorazio’s work in the 1950’s consisted of all-over meshes of colored lines, and in the 1960’s he produced, like the American Color Field painters, expansive paintings that asserted vivid color and simplified, often geometrically ordered design. He would continue in this style for the remainder of his career. Dorazio passed away at the age of 77, in May 2005, in a hospital in Perugia, near his home in Todi.
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