THE PROTEST

Long before Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram, Ted DeGrazia went viral.

The Arizona artist knew a thing or two about self-promotion and marketing. And in May 1976, he was no lone rider as he ventured into the Superstition Mountains to burn a selection of his paintings as a protest against tax laws.

In those pre-livestreaming days, a gaggle of journalists, along with Yaqui and Apache friends and a film crew, accompanied DeGrazia on his horseback ride to the cliff dwellings at Angel Spring. He prepared a teepee-style pyre, then arranged the paintings around the wood. Some say he poured whiskey on his art as an accelerant and that the wind blew out the first three matches he struck. Then, DeGrazia took his cigar and torched a few charcoal sketches, using those to light his paintings.

It took hours to burn all of the art before DeGrazia marked the ashes with a pair of Apache-style crosses. He claimed he’d burned 100 paintings, worth a combined $1.5 million, which, when adjusted for inflation, would be $6.8 million in 2019. But in his book DeGrazia: The Man and the Myths, James Johnson writes that witnesses suggested no more than 30 works — most of them lesser or unfinished paintings with little value — went up in flames.

Regardless, DeGrazia’s protest made international news, and a legend was born. “After everything burned, he sat there crying, eating beans out of a can and drinking his whiskey,” says Lance Laber, executive director of the DeGrazia Foundation. “How often does someone burn $1.5 million worth of paintings? Or take $1.5 million in cash and burn it?”

The answer to the second question: almost certainly never. As for the first, last fall, the anonymous street artist and activist Banksy — like DeGrazia, no stranger to publicity — sold a painting at auction for $1.4 million. But Banksy had concealed a shredder in the picture frame. After the auctioneer gaveled the sale closed, someone in the audience used a remote control to turn on the shredder, reducing the painting to little more than ribbons. The art world’s consensus? Banksy’s work might be even more valuable now that it’s in tatters.

In his book The Museum of Lost Art, art historian Noah Charney argues that over the centuries, war, looting and vandalism have destroyed more masterpieces than exist in the world’s museums today. But it’s still rare for artists to do the damage themselves, although Charney says Michelangelo incinerated drawings to conceal the toil that went into his finished paintings, and that Pablo Picasso sometimes reused canvases.
 

Later in her life, Georgia O’Keeffe destroyed early works that didn’t rise to her exacting standards, while Charney writes that John Baldessari burned 13 years’ worth of paintings as a way to “reinvent himself” in what he dubbed “The Cremation Project.” And after turning 80 in 1991, photographer Brett Weston burned his inventory of negatives, arguing that any prints produced by others wouldn’t truly be his works.

Although he apprenticed with famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, whose art frequently portrayed overtly political themes, DeGrazia was an unlikely crusader. But he decided to make a statement about the estate tax, which remains a hot-button issue and often is derided as the “death tax.”

DeGrazia railed against the regulations that affected him as an artist, saying that if he donated works to a university or museum, the government would allow him to deduct only the materials he used while creating the art — canvases, brushes and paints — not the market value of the unsold paintings themselves. When he died, however, the government could tax his heirs on the full value of the art.

If DeGrazia ultimately failed to move federal tax policy, he did prove, long before any number of contemporary publicity hounds and miscreants, that notoriety can be monetized. In the aftermath of his protest, he declared that he might burn 1,000 more works. He never went through with the threat, but curious visitors flocked to his Gallery in the Sun [see page 46], and Johnson writes in his DeGrazia biography that a year after the incident, the artist guided groups of tourists on overnight trips into the Superstitions.

And more than 40 years later, DeGrazia’s protest lives on. There were rumors that he’d stashed a number of paintings, protected by aluminum tubes, in caves in the mountains, creating a latter-day tale of hidden treasure reminiscent of the Superstitions’ fabled Lost Dutchman Gold Mine. “People have been searching for these paintings forever,” Laber says. “Every year or two, someone will call and say that they know where the paintings are. Or they have the aluminum tubes and want our help opening them up. But nothing ever comes of it.”

In our age of livestreamed housecleaning and webcams showing grass growing, it’s natural to see DeGrazia’s act as little more than a cynical publicity stunt, an analog antecedent to today’s clickbait digital exces­ses. But whatever his gifts for self-promotion, DeGrazia was, first and foremost, an artist. Burning his works affected him deeply, and he didn’t paint again for years. “I have damaged myself mentally, spiritually and physically,” he told the Cleveland Plain Dealer in an article displayed at the Gallery in the Sun. “And the damage seems to be permanent. I have lost all feeling for painting.”