Pietro Lazzari was an Italian-American painter, sculptor, illustrator, and printmaker educated at the Ornamental School of Rome. Following service in an artillery unit during World War I, he became part of the Italian Futurist movement in the 1920s and exhibited with such artists as Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini. He then moved to Paris for several years before returning to Rome, where his first solo exhibition was held at the Theatre of the Independents.
With the rise of Fascism, Lazzari moved to New York in 1925. In the following year he was one of nine European artists who contributed to an important exhibition at the New Gallery, alongside Pablo Picasso, Julius Pascin, and Amedeo Modigliani. He was represented by the Betty Parsons Gallery.
Lazzari became an American citizen during the era of the Great Depression and did commissions for the Works Progress Administration and the Federal Art Project. It was at this time that he participated in the famous Abstract Art in America exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
In the early 1940s, Pietro Lazzari moved permanently to Washington D.C., where he established his studio and participated in the 1942 World War II National Artists for Victory exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Lazzari was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship and received commissions for bronze portraits of Pope Paul VI and Eleanor Roosevelt. He was a full member of the National Society of Mural Painters, Artists Equity Association, the Art Guild of Washington, and the Washington Watercolor Society. He also taught sculpture and drawing techniques at American University and at the Corcoran School of Art. His works are found in such major collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian Institution, Georgetown University, and the San Francisco Museums of Fine Art, among others.
