Piero Dorazio, who died on Tuesday at age 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 centered on large pieces that created structural reductions of form, particularly by utilizing primary color fields to explore the decorative possibilities of linear and plane compositions.

Piero D’Orazio (he dropped the apostrophe early in life) was born in Rome on June 19, 1927, and began painting during the World War II. In 1945, Dorazio began to study architecture at the Universita degli Studi. He had also begun to reexamine Futurism, 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.

In 1948, Dorazio returned to Rome, 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 he wrote “La Fantasia dell’Arte nella Vita Moderna” (1955), the first book to appear in Italy that dealt with the international modern tradition.

In 1953, Dorazio had accepted an invitation to attend a seminar at Harvard, and he 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 a tour of 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, Giuliana.