THE ARTIST

He had the backing of better painters. No. He had the backing of more critically acclaimed painters. José Clemente Orozco. Diego Rivera. Others. They found words of praise for him that, in hindsight, might seem contrived. In reality, though, they likely were born of great admiration for the man — and not necessarily for his work.

In fact, in the March 1949 issue of this magazine, Rivera raved about Ted DeGrazia: “His paintings greatly interested me because of his brilliant artistic gift and his personal sentiment, so original that it prevails through some strange influence, perhaps unconscious.” Rivera continued: “The fugue in the execution of his painting, his acute romantic and exalted observation and his feeling for proportion give the certainty that when developed as an artist, DeGrazia will become a prominent personality in American art.”

When people speak of a fugue, it’s typically in reference to music or the psyche. Of the former, it’s a composition in which a short repetition of notes or phrases is introduced in one part and gradually woven into others. In the latter, it’s a period of loss of identity, most often associated with hysteria.

For DeGrazia, it may have been both.
 

“Often I went on long hikes with my father. We always came home with our pockets filled with colored minerals. These rocks I crushed with a hammer for color. Color fascinated me.”

— Ted DeGrazia

Born in the Southern Arizona town of Morenci in 1909, three years before Arizona became a state, Ettore “Ted” DeGrazia was the child of Italian immigrants. His father was a miner, as were his grandparents. And so, DeGrazia was exposed at a young age to the sensory extravagances associated with life in a mining town — the languages of the working men, the colors of the desert, the influences of Mexican and Native cultures in music, art and everyday life.

In her 2007 thesis, Kitsch and Southwest Hybridity in the Art of Ted DeGrazia, Karen Jeanne Dalton writes: “Americans did not speak Spanish or have names like ‘Juan’ or ‘Estevan’ or ‘Ettore’ (DeGrazia’s given name), which became anglicized to ‘John,’ ‘Steven,’ and ‘Ted’ as a child entered the school system. These new American signifiers, and others, subtly reminded everyone that the United States was the ruling colonial political power in Southern Arizona. This was the multicultural atmosphere of Morenci at the time of DeGrazia’s birth, where power, class and position were determined by money or earning potential, which was further linked to ethnicity. If one was not American, in every sense of the word, then one was an outsider, an ‘other.’ ”

From 1920 to 1925, the mines closed, and DeGrazia’s parents moved the family back to Italy’s Calabria region. There, the 11-year-old boy forgot how to speak English, so when he returned to Arizona at 16, he entered first grade and had to relearn the language. It was an experience, Dalton asserts, that “taught him what it was like to feel like an immigrant in the land of his birth.”

DeGrazia was, in fact, an outsider.

Ultimately, though, the man from Morenci earned two undergraduate degrees — one in music education and one in fine art — as well as a master’s of fine arts. And he completed his studies by 1945, in an era when most Americans never surpassed the eighth grade. He supported himself by planting trees on the university campus, playing trumpet and leading his big band in nighttime gigs.

He married Alexandra Diamos in 1936 and moved to Bisbee to run the town’s Lyric Theatre, which was owned by his bride’s family. The couple had three children, then divorced in 1946.

While DeGrazia overcame the challenges of his working-man upbringing, even at the collegiate level, he was denied accolades, acclaim and, in many cases, respect. There is an undeniable value, though, to the artist’s early work. In pieces such as The Losers and Defeat, there is an obvious thoughtfulness: They are tributes, in a sense, to the cultures by which DeGrazia found himself surrounded.

With The Losers, the forlorn faces of a Hispanic family loom over their dead rooster. The brushstrokes are clean. The painting is linear. Colorful. Emotional. The same can be said for Defeat.
 

It’s that style of his early work that some in the art world wish DeGrazia had clung to — a style that seems to comment on mining, on his upbringing, on socioeconomics and humanity.

“You cannot start lower than that, in every sense of the word,” DeGrazia explained to author Harry Redl about mining for Redl’s 1981 book, The World of DeGrazia: An Artist of the American Southwest.

Jeff Mitchell, a Phoenix-based former gallery owner and current art consultant, completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Arizona in the 1960s. As he did, he worked at a little art supply store at the intersection of Speedway Boulevard and Park Avenue in Tucson.

“Ted would come in to buy his supplies,” Mitchell remembers. “He was a very neat guy. Local ladies would come in, too, and they’d fawn all over him.”

In biographies and articles about the painter, it’s that magnetic quality that seeps from the stories. He had charisma. Charm. A magnetic, irrefutable appeal. Still, that fire wasn’t enough to endear him to his critics.

“From a fine art and academic point of view, teachers would laugh,” Mitchell says. “But the talent was there early on. He didn’t want to handle a pick and shovel his whole life.”

So, DeGrazia studied with Rivera and Orozco, even spending time in Mexico and interning for the world-renowned painters. Ultimately, they hosted an exhibition of DeGrazia’s work at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City.

And although DeGrazia was deeply influenced by his Mexican friends, another of his early pieces pays homage to the style of Thomas Hart Benton, particularly Benton’s Steel. DeGrazia’s piece is black and white, and moody, while his early work in celebration of music was vibrant, abstract, wild, lovely. He seemed an artistic chameleon, bouncing between styles, methods and inspirations.

“His musical education, those experiences, were important,” Mitchell contends. “DeGrazia was intellectualizing between music and the visual arts.”

It was profound. Still, the artist couldn’t gather critical steam.

“All his life, DeGrazia was denied enfranchisement by the leaders of the university and art intelligentsia, which refused him legitimacy,” Dalton writes. “He, in turn, rejected their authority and sought and gained approval of the newly emerging middle-class market of post-World War II America.”
 

“It is too easy to analyze something out of existence. Don’t underestimate the people.”

— Ted DeGrazia
 

It was easy, too, for DeGrazia to build a relationship with Raymond Carlson, editor of Arizona Highways from 1938 to 1971.

Carlson was a foster parent of sorts for creative types. He nurtured and cultivated and explored. He forged relationships with photographers such as Ansel Adams, Barry Goldwater and Josef Muench. He made friends with illustrators and painters such as Ross Santee, Hal Empie, Larry Toschik and George Avey (Arizona Highways’ longtime art director).

And, of course, there was his relationship with DeGrazia, which lasted more than 40 years. Both of their fathers were miners. Both of them went to college. Both of them liked to drink. And both of them had a deeply rooted love of Arizona and the Southwest.
 

The first of DeGrazia’s paintings appeared in the magazine in 1941. Then, his work appeared on covers, in portfolios. Everywhere.

“DeGrazia’s association with the magazine facilitated his success as an artist by validating his art with a degree of authenticity,” Dalton writes. “DeGrazia and Arizona Highways targeted the same audience or consumer, i.e., the middle-class automobile tourist.”

In the same issue as Rivera’s accolades for DeGrazia, in March 1949, we find this, from Orozco: “DeGrazia’s painting has all the freshness, simplicity and power of youth. He is able to go from simple and graceful movement to deep understanding of human misery.”

And by the time the magazine’s 50th anniversary rolled around in 1975, presenting a retrospective of the talent that had appeared in its pages over the years, there was this: “Since DeGrazia’s first exposure in the early 1940s, his art has made more friends and sold more copies of Arizona Highways than all the other popular artists combined.”

Suddenly, DeGrazia had commercial appeal.
 

“I want to be notorious, rather than famous. Fame has too much responsibility. People forget you are human.”

— Ted DeGrazia
 

It’s a Tuesday in late winter, and Lance Laber is walking through DeGrazia’s Gallery in the Sun, across a floor the artist made by lacquering cross sections of cactuses. The gallery’s adobe buildings hide in the shadow of the Santa Catalina Mountains, tucked amid chollas and paloverdes, and built by DeGrazia himself, along with a collection of his Yaqui friends. It was the early 1950s, just a few years after he married sculptor Marion Sheret in a Mexican jungle.

Together, they created a wild, nature-gracious space. Breezy and light-filled, it’s home to approximately 15,000 of DeGrazia’s pieces.

The artist would open his doors here from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., the same hours the gallery welcomes visitors today, says Laber, the gallery’s executive director.

“He would wake up at about 9:30 and be in the gallery at 10,” Laber says. “He’d lie down again in the afternoon, then be up most of the night — there were a lot of midnight sketches. Then, he’d rest again around 5 a.m., get up at 9:30 and do it all over again.”

DeGrazia in fugue.

Whether you look at it as discipline or mania, the routine was partly responsible for the rate at which DeGrazia’s work became commercially popular. He painted all the time. A National Geographic profile in 1953 led to greater notoriety, as did his frequent coverage in Arizona Highways, but it wasn’t until 1960, when UNICEF acquired the 1957 painting Los Niños to adorn its holiday card, that DeGrazia’s work could be found everywhere.

There were roadrunner glasses, magnets and coasters with the Niños. Prints with faceless, brightly hued child angels. Notecards with Yaqui dancers and fat babies in papooses. More.

The outsider was making money hand over fist after years of unsuccessful attempts to sell his paintings himself. According to lore (and a 1977 article in the Arizona Daily Star), DeGrazia would prop his paintings outside at his first gallery, on Campbell Avenue, overnight. The next day, the work would still be there, and DeGrazia would lament that “people wouldn’t even steal them.”
 

Still, Dalton asserts in her thesis: “One of DeGrazia’s strongest characteristics was his unwavering belief in himself and his artistic talent. … Frustrated at the art world that would not accept him, DeGrazia continued to paint and found a market with which he identified and that he embraced — mainstream America. He ameliorated his marginalized status as an outsider in the art world by finding a niche in the kitsch market. By targeting this market, he was able to take himself from a place of having no power and no appreciation to a place where he was appreciated, and where he exerted complete power and control.”

To some, DeGrazia became the Walt Disney of Southwestern art. Take Shad Kvetko, for instance. Kvetko now owns Las Almas Rotas, a popular mezcaleria in Dallas’ Expo Park neighborhood, but he also maintains a vintage business that began in Phoenix.

“You know, I grew up despising DeGrazia’s art,” Kvetko says. “His insipid paintings of Indian children on magnets, greeting cards and more were omnipresent.”

To others, such as Laber, DeGrazia was documenting the Native people of Southern Arizona in a way that the people of Middle America (think Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin) and beyond could understand and appreciate.

“His work matters because it brought out the history of Arizona through the telling of stories associated with the state’s Native tribes,” Laber says. “And they loved him for it. It was such a draw for the state’s economy. He brought joy to people.”

Retrospectively, Kvetko sees it, too.

“It wasn’t until later, when I learned more about him and was exposed to his early works influenced by the Mexican modernists, that I began to appreciate him,” he says. “Then, I learned of the scope of his creativity in working in different media, including building his gallery and home in Tucson. Now, I can even look back on the Indian children paintings with nostalgia for home. I think his commercialism hurt him in the eyes of fine art critics, but I also think he was more of a folk artist, anyhow.”

Despite not being a professional art critic, Kvetko hits the proverbial nail on the head. The outsider, synthesized.

“Not to know a rule in art and break it is bad art, but to know a rule and break it is good art. Only by knowing the rules and breaking them will one develop an individual style.”

— Ted DeGrazia
 

The actual critics may have tried to analyze DeGrazia’s work out of existence. It didn’t work. So beloved are his drawings, paintings and sculptures that thousands of people visit his gallery each year.

On that Tuesday morning in late winter, three women traveling together from the Midwest are outside the gallery. They ask for a photograph at the entrance.

“I had no idea how much sculpture he did,” one says.

The others talk about the depth of the Padre Kino collection — DeGrazia’s 20-piece homage to Father Eusebio Francisco Kino, the Jesuit missionary who established 24 missions across the Southwest in 24 years, befriending Native people along the way.

It’s that imagery, born of DeGrazia’s profoundly ingrained spiritual sense, that most stands out there.

“He was a deeply religious man,” says Mitchell, the art consultant. “He was sensitive.”
 

Now, it’s a Thursday morning in Paradise Valley, and Mitchell is flipping through a book of DeGrazia’s work. It was published by the University of Arizona Museum of Art in the 1970s, and Mitchell has flagged certain pages with pale yellow Post-it notes.

Mitchell is friends with Ed Mell, a painter whose work is both critically and socially acclaimed. Mitchell’s company, Mitchell Brown Fine Art, Inc., has specialized in art acquisitions and sales for more than 35 years. So to say that Mitchell knows a thing or two about the art world would be a gross understatement.

He is on page 30 of the book, discussing the painting that is reminiscent of Benton. “He’s struggling with the handling of paint,” Mitchell says. Just two pages earlier, when The Losers appears, a different take: “This is a sophisticated painting, in terms of the composition and the drafting.”

The implication is that, had DeGrazia stuck with his early style of work, he might have seen much greater critical acclaim. Mitchell owns the assertion.

“He would have been a very good painter as he matured,” he says. “But the commercialism devalued him. It some cases, it looks as though he was using a brush that had half its hairs.”

Later, DeGrazia worked with only a palette knife. It was a technique he used to create many of the pieces that made him famous, the ones that made Ettore DeGrazia just DeGrazia.

Mitchell is searching for an answer to a question about whether any modern artists are comparable to DeGrazia, in terms of both the manner in which he produced work — feverishly, religiously, wildly — and the way he marketed it. The answer, at first, is unsurprising. But it takes a surprising turn. Mitchell compares DeGrazia to one of the 20th century’s most iconic painters.

“Street painters in France would have done similar things in terms of the mass production,” he says. “But if you think about it, DeGrazia was a lot like Andy Warhol, too. Not in terms of the way the paintings were executed, but in terms of popularity [and] marketing.”

Indeed, both men knew the rules. And they broke them — Warhol with his candy-colored pop art, DeGrazia with his faceless Indians. Warhol with his Catholicism and his crystal healing and his wig collection, DeGrazia with his 1976 protest (wherein he burned dozens of his paintings in the Superstition Mountains to protest estate taxes; see The Protest, page 50) and his rumored affairs and his anti-establishment attitudes.

The men were notorious, not merely famous.

That said, the critical praise of Warhol’s work today means his work fetches incredible sums at auction. His portrait of Mao Zedong garnered $47.5 million when it was last for sale. One of the higher-priced pieces in the consignment room at the Gallery in the Sun, on the other hand, tops out at $16,500.

By the time DeGrazia died, in 1982, there was no consensus about his art. Some hated it; many loved it. The same is true today. Regardless, a few things are clear about Ted DeGrazia. He loved to paint. He loved his work. And he loved the desert Southwest and its people. Take it from his friend, Raymond Carlson.

“Genius or madman he may be, but you can’t help liking him,” Carlson wrote in that March 1949 issue of Arizona Highways. “He’ll continue to paint, make ceramics and lay adobe with equal intensity, smiling at the passing world, wondering if the people of that world will ever accept him. He’ll continue to paint the way he wants to paint.”