Piero Dorazio was an Italian painter who was pivotal in bringing abstraction to Italy. His oil paintings were often composed of intensely colored bands, which are stretched and intermingled like webs across the surface of the canvas. “The progressive elements in our society have to maintain a revolutionary and avant-garde position,” Dorazio said of creating art. Born on June 29, 1927 in Rome, Italy, he studied painting, drawing, and architecture at the University of Rome. In the late 1940s, the artist became active in a variety of artistic and literary circles, including Gino Severini and Renato Guttuso. He went on to become a co-founder of Forma 1, the first group of Italian abstract artists. In 1953, he traveled to New York, where...