Gillo Dorfles
Art Cups from Illy

Gillo Dorfles is a philosopher, an artist and a tireless explorer of taste, fashion and techniques. He is an art critic, intellectual, sociologist of the arts, semiologist and scholar of aesthetics. He has been one of the keenest observers of the development of art and aesthetics since the 1940s. Since the 1930s Gillo Dorfles has pursued his own career as an artist alongside his academic career as a professor of aesthetics. He has written numerous essays on the latest developments in the arts and social behaviour. Gillo Dorfles was born in 1910 in the mittel-European city of Trieste. In 1928 he enrolled at University in Milan and graduated in Medicine in 1934, with a specialization in Psychiatry. However, he left medicine behind and turned to the study of aesthetics and art criticism, writing some of the most influential texts on contemporary art. From the 1960s onward he taught as a lecturer and then as a professor of Aesthetics at the Universities of Milan, Trieste and Cagliari.