Giorgio Cavallon (1904-1989) was an Italian-American artist, one of the founders of the American Abstract Artists group and an important member of the Abstract Expressionism movement.
Cavallon was born in Sorio (Italy) in 1904 and moved to the United States when he was sixteen. In 1926, he settled in New York, where he attended the National Academy of Design, meeting important artists like Ilya Bolotowsky, Lee Krasner, and others. He spent a couple of summers in Provincetown studying with Charles Hawthorne, who taught him how to work directly with color.
In 1929, he received a Louis Comfort Tiffany fellowship that guaranteed him living quarters and a studio space. During the Depression, Cavallon returned to Italy where he stayed for three years. Back to New York, he started to study drawing with Hans Hofmann.
In 1936 Cavallon joined other like-minded artists in founding the American Abstract Artists group, with whom he exhibited until 1957. In 1946, he joined Charles Egan’s gallery and had his first one-man show in eleven years.
In 1949 he participated in the Ninth Street Show, and the following year Leo Castelli selected his work to appear in the exhibition, Young Painters in the U.S. and France, at Sidney Janis Gallery.
After Egan’s gallery closed, Giorgio Cavallon exhibited at Stable Gallery and at Kootz Gallery in New York. He taught briefly at the University of North Carolina and served as visiting critic in painting at Yale University in 1964.
His work is in the collection of numerous major museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art.