Giorgio Cavallon

Born in Sorio, near Vicenza, Italy, abstract painter Georgio Cavallon was influenced early in his career by Dutch modernist Piet Mondrian. In New York City during the 1930s and 1940s, he was closely associated with Arshile Gorky, William De Kooning, and other abstract expressionists. The geometric forms in relatively later work such as "Untitled,"1959, in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, have been compared to the color shapes of the early work of Matisse.

Since the late 1960s and 1970s, Cavallon has framed his surfaces with small, dark shapes in order to control the large, unified rectangles of light color. Cavallon's paintings have been described as exuding a subtle, atmospheric light reminiscent of Mediterranean villages.

Cavallon first came to the United States with his family in 1906 but returned to Italy in 1910 following the death of his mother. At age 16, Cavallon again emigrated to the United States and undertook an art education. He attended the National Academy of Design from 1926 to 1930, and studied with Charles W. Hawthorne in Provincetown during the summer of 1927. From 1934 to 1936, he studied at the Hans Hoffman School of Fine Arts in the evenings. Cavallon received the first of many solo exhibitions at the ACA Gallery in New York in 1934.

During the mid-1930s, the artist joined the WPA Federal Art Project, and worked for a time as an assistant to abstract painter Arshile Gorky. He was a founding member of American Abstract Artists, an organization in which he was involved from 1936 to 1957.