THE EARLY YEARS

Editor’s Note: This story was originally published in the February 1941 issue of Arizona Highways. It was Ted DeGrazia’s first appearance in the magazine. As former editor Joseph Stacey wrote: “Ted DeGrazia might have been Arizona’s most illustrious bar mural painter if he’d not been discovered by Mary Helen ‘Zilch’ Carlson and [Editor] Raymond Carlson. Make no mistake about this truth: Arizona Highways discovered Ted DeGrazia and put him onstage.”

There appeared for exhibition in Arizona this season a group of oil paintings by a young man from Bisbee. The exhibition was entitled: Dust of Mexico! Presented herein are a few reproductions from that exhibition.

The impression that this series of paintings makes on a person depends entirely on the person, and again on the person’s reaction to Mexico, and especially the northern part of Mexico.

Generally when travelers speak of Mexico they refer to the central part, where the vegetation has all the richness of the tropics. They refer to Mexico City, where their entire orbit centers about the cafés and the Hotel Reforma. But there is another Mexico. We have a different Mexico right close to us, just across the line. Travelers into Arizona during the winter should not fail to visit Sonora, for even if your travel bags bear the sticker of the Reforma and Mexico D.F., you still have something to learn of Mexico.

You will find the desert and its people in the streets of sun-beaten villages. You will find laughter, for always there is laughter, and you will find sorrow, for there is always sorrow, too. You might find much, too, to recall some of the things you see in the paintings from the collection: Dust of Mexico!

The young man from Bisbee is Ted DeGrazia, a very sincere person, and one of whom you may someday hear much. Ted DeGrazia is married and has two children. He devotes himself sufficiently to his business affairs to keep the household running comfortably, and then, when time permits, he crosses the international boundary, which isn’t much more than a hop, skip and jump from Bisbee, and sketches what he sees and feels about the country. He speaks Spanish like a “puro paisano,” and there isn’t a little village in all of northern Sonora that he hasn’t lived in, let alone visited. He’s natural and normal enough to walk into any small cantina in any small village of northern Sonora and order a mescal without the customers instinctively labeling him a “turista.” And that he can take the mescal occasionally without too many grimaces merely identifies him as a person who knows his way around northern Sonora.
 

VIVA!, 1940
“Many of the paintings in Ted DeGrazia’s Mexican Revolution series feature women soldiers carrying rifles and ammunition, holding children, and protesting,” says Gallery in the Sun curator Jim Jenkins. “In this image, an angry but confused-looking mob of men are milling about a lone woman who defiantly glares from the center of the crowd.”

 

Ted DeGrazia was born in Morenci, Arizona, on June 14, 1909, the third of seven children born to Domenico DeGrazia and Lucia Gagliardi DeGrazia, natives of Italy. The boy was christened Ettore.

In 1920, the DeGrazia family, children and all, went to Italy for a visit, remaining there until 1925. “While there,” Ted DeGrazia says, “I was around the churches and saw many decorations and Church artists. I began to work with clay, in imitation of the Church artists, and even got some paints and tried to paint pictures, always with the religious theme.”

The family returned to Morenci from Italy in 1925. Ted had to learn to speak English all over again, and in seven years, completed twelve grades in school. After graduation from high school, DeGrazia worked in the mines, but with the shutdown in 1932, with no work on the horizon, he decided to attend college. When he entered the University of Arizona, he had $15 in his pockets and a trumpet under his arm. The fact that he could play the trumpet with vigor was a virtue that contributed materially to his college education. The truth is that this trumpet paid his way through college, because it wasn’t long before he had an orchestra of his own. It should be recorded that one of the performers in his early orchestra was a boy by the name of Teddy Essex, a genius if there ever was one, around whom there are already arising legends as to his wizardry with the horn. But that is another story.

At the University of Arizona, DeGrazia came under the influence of the late Joseph DeLuca, of the College of Music, and decided to follow music for a career.

Upon leaving the University, he was married to Miss Alexandra Diamos, the daughter of prominent Tucson residents, and shortly thereafter entered business in Bisbee. His visits to the villages and towns of northern Sonora rekindled his interest in painting, so the trumpet was forsaken for the brush and palette. His ease and friendliness, his innate courtesy and his fluency with the language and with the Mexican idiom made him welcome wherever he went. All of this together with a deep love and understanding of the strange country to the south and the simple people there gives him an entrée denied others with a more formal approach.
 

If you would care to call this rambling essay an art criticism, you are guilty of misnomer. We are merely trying to tell you a few things about a young man from Bisbee who paints, and in our opinion paints very well. He is a very gracious person, and very sincere, and, as all artists should, he is striving to make a name and a place for himself. We know how much his painting means to him and the great enjoyment he derives from it. The most learned comment we can make about DeGrazia’s work is that we would be very proud to own his painting Defeat, because we like it very much, for we, too, feel very deeply about Mexico and the people there, and the painting makes one feel good inside.

The paintings we reproduce herein from Dust of Mexico! are Defeat, Viva!, Un Domingo and Felicidad. The first expresses symbolically the eternal combat of the country, the second the fury and emotion of a simple people aroused. The third is a quiet Sunday in a small village, and the fourth portrays the happiness and pride that a person has in a pet rooster. Brewery Gulch at 4 a.m. and San Xavier are studies of historic places in Southern Arizona.
 

SMALL TOWN VIEW, 1940
The lower end of Bisbee’s Brewery Gulch is shown at night in this piece. Jenkins notes that the “Gluch Bar” sign on the left is one of several examples of DeGrazia’s dyslexia. An alternate title for this painting is Brewery Gulch at 4 a.m., as referenced in this story.

To add a note of authority to this essay, we will close by quoting Charles Tracy, eminent surrealist author, dramatist and artist, who says of DeGrazia:

“Many years ago when I was a young art teacher at Columbus, Ohio, a young man brought a portfolio of drawings to me for criticism. I advised him to join my class, but he smilingly informed me that he could not learn in that way. I liked his frankness and did the best thing that I could — I encouraged him. Five years later I met him in New York, where he had reached the top. That boy’s name was George Bellows. Art history is punctuated with such geniuses — they ignore standards — they just naturally know how to make pictures and proceed to do just that.

“Ted DeGrazia came to me only a few months ago with a half dozen attempts at paintings. I knew at once that regular art instruction was not for him, so I encouraged him. Today he surprises me by exhibiting at least a score of masterful paintings. It is not possible, yet he has done it, and so far as I can judge, his pictures are all his own conceptions. In these days we tag such painters as ‘primitives.’ I would indeed be surprised if Ted is not discovered as such and his works end up hanging in many museums of fine art within five years or less. Ted DeGrazia understands and sympathizes with the underprivileged Mexicans, and with bold, direct brush strokes, he paints as his heart directs. He could never use color science with his kind of graphics — to him, sky is blue, clouds are white, old shacks are brown, the faces of his subjects are simple and sad — so he paints them that way. It is his kind of art, and it is wonderful.”

You should spend some time following the vagrant country roads that ramble about northern Sonora and learn to know and understand the people you meet along those roads. Then you’ll like the paintings of Ted DeGrazia.
 

DEFEAT, 1940
“The Mexican Revolution paintings were an overtly political facet of the social realism of DeGrazia’s early work,” Jenkins says. “Here, dispirited revolutionaries retreat through their village, presumably to fight another day.”