Piero Dorazio 1927–2005
Born in Rome the youngest of six children, painter Piero Dorazio was a pivotal force in bringing abstraction to Italy. An ardent believer in the power of abstract art as a social force, Dorazio made canvases with thick bands of color and cross-hatched lines, remaining consistent in this style for his entire career. As Dorazio himself wrote in his 1955 book The Fantasy of Art in Modern Life, he believed that “Abstract art could change the world…That just as science and technology were destroying the barriers between different cultures, so the new 'universal style' would lead to a 'universal civilisation'.”
As a child, Dorazio drew the natural world around him and received an eclectic education at the Julius Caesar lyceum, where subjects included entomology and monument restoration. World War II forced Dorazio’s family to flee to Abruzzo in 1943, but he returned to Rome after the war where he began to study architecture and make the acquaintance of artists including Gino Severini, Giacomo Balla, and Renato Guttuso. In 1947, Dorazio was awarded a prize from the French government that allowed him to study at the École des Beaux-Arts of Paris. That same year, he became a founding member of Forma 1, a group that promoted abstraction as a revolutionary and necessary movement. Along with fellow Forma 1 co-founders Mino Perilli and Mino Guerrini, in 1950 Dorazio founded L’Age d’Or, bookstore and gallery space dedicated to the abstract avant-garde.
Dorazio traveled to the U.S. for the first time in 1953, when he was invited by Harvard University to teach a summer course. Remaining in the U.S. for a year, Dorazio met many of the era’s most significant artists, including Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, Helen Frankenthaler, and Jackson Pollock, whose action painting techniques influenced Dorazio to an extent. Dorazio took a teaching position at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design in the early 1960s, working one semester every year and dividing his time between the U.S. and Italy for nearly a decade. In 1970, he permanently returned to his native Italy, where he lived until his passing in 2005. Today, his works are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others.
