Before the Kitsch

The most interesting thing in the Ted DeGrazia “modernist” show at
the Tucson Museum of Art is not anything the artist made himself.

It’s a photograph by somebody else. The anonymous photographer
captured a self-confident young DeGrazia in 1942, standing with Diego
Rivera in Rivera’s Mexico City studio.

The great Mexican muralist is his usual self—towering,
rotund—a palette and brush in his hand. He looks at the camera
indifferently. Behind him hangs a large painting in progress, of a
couple of nudes cavorting through a field of sunflowers. A rustic
wooden doorway to the right opens up to a sun-filled Mexican
garden.

DeGrazia, then 33, is dressed in a jean jacket and jeans, a
cigarette resting lightly between his fingers, every inch the bohemian
artist. He’s planted himself cockily beside the much larger man, his
legs apart in an aggressive stance. He gazes coolly at the camera. He
more than takes up the space.

The photograph strikes me as a first step in the construction of the
DeGrazia persona. He’s every bit the great man’s equal, an artist ready
to triumph. And a second photograph shows how the story turned out:
Shot a dozen or so years later, it mimics the first. Now with grizzled
hair and a beard, DeGrazia stands in an architectural space a lot like
Rivera’s, his Gallery in the Sun in Tucson. He has own murals on the
walls, and his own sunny Mexican-style garden is seen through his
rustic doorway. He’s an artist who has arrived, a Rivera for
Tucson.

Except that he wasn’t. Where Rivera painted glorious paintings that
melded Mexican motifs with modernist principles, DeGrazia became a king
of kitsch. For years, he churned out cutesy Indians, icky angels and
galloping horses with glittery manes. He hit the big time when UNICEF
picked one of his paintings of kids for its Christmas card in 1960.
Twenty-seven years after his death in 1982, his Gallery in the Sun
remains a major tourist attraction. Visitors are invited to buy
DeGrazia plates. (“Festival of Lights,” picturing a big-eyed Indian
girl holding a menorah, is $375 from a “limited edition” of 10,000.) Or
they can pick up bells, magnets, notecards and other knickknacks. The
“Merry Little Indian” coaster is a bargain at $6.

As a young man, though, DeGrazia had
aspirations—apparently—to do serious art. DeGrazia
cultivated the image of The Primitive, but he was a trained painter,
with two degrees in art from the University of Arizona, a bachelor’s
and a master’s, and a second master’s in music. TMA chief curator Julie
Sasse says the thesis for the second master’s was a sophisticated look
at visual responses to music.

His experiments with modernism won him a place in a memorable 1990s
show on early Tucson modernists, put together at the University of
Arizona Museum of Art by its late, lamented director Peter
Bermingham.

Now at the TMA, Julie Sasse has put together a small show,
DeGrazia: A Modernist Perspective. Drawing on the holdings of
the Gallery in the Sun, she’s gathered together 10 oil paintings and a
sprinkling of tempera, ink, watercolor and gouache works, as well as a
couple of ceramics and textile designs. In the works, she has divined
influences from Van Gogh and Chagall to Kandinsky and O’Keeffe.

In “Fiesta at San Xavier” from 1960, an oil on canvas that pictures
fireworks streaking into a midnight blue sky, she sees echoes of Van
Gogh’s “Starry Night.” The pallid towers of DeGrazia’s “San Francisco,”
1950, another oil on canvas, are descended from O’Keeffe’s New York
City skyscrapers of the 1920s. Even his Virgin of Guadalupe, the
faceless “Our Lady” from 1955, has a modernist side: The spiraling
flowers on her pink gown are inspired by Matisse at his most
decorative.

One early work, from 1947, an abstracted vision of a Mexican jungle,
all jutting vines and palm trees in purple and teal, even appropriates
the title of a work by the European painter Franz Marc, an artist known
for “exuberant color and the expression of emotional and spiritual
states,” Sasse writes.

So what happened? It’s hard to separate truth from legend at this
point. He was born Ettore DeGrazia in Morenci 100 years ago this week,
on June 14, 1909, hence the anniversary show at TMA and the hoopla this
weekend at the Gallery in the Sun. His parents were Italian immigrants,
part of a large Italian community lured by work in the copper mines.
DeGrazia’s father was a miner like the rest, but when copper went bust
for a time after World War I, the family returned to Italy, in
1920.

Sasse surmises that young Ted immersed himself in intense religious
art during his five years in his parents’ homeland. The earliest work
on display, “Three Sad Women,” painted when DeGrazia was in his early
20s, is an austere, and promising, rendering of three heads shrouded in
black.

DeGrazia was in and out of Tucson by the ’30s. After he married for
the first time, he lived with his family in Bisbee during the late ’30s
and early ’40s, running a theater and painting. “Bisbee Bus Depot,”
1942, is a fine oil of the hill town Bisbee by night. Painted in a
regionalist style reminiscent of Thomas Hart Benton, it readily
conjures up the town’s eccentric architecture and narrow streets. The
depot’s red-orange roofs glow against the teal-gray sky.

His work hit the pages of Arizona Highways in 1941. Maybe it
was this local success that buoyed him with the idea of going to Mexico
to meet Rivera. As Sasse delicately puts it, he always had
self-confidence. He was once quoted as saying, “If an artist doesn’t
believe in himself, who will?”

According to one story, DeGrazia bribed a security guard to let him
into Rivera’s studio. Once inside, he apparently captivated the Mexican
painter, and ended up doing what’s described as an internship with
Rivera and the other great Mexican muralist of the day, José
Clemente Orozco.

Mexico City had been an epicenter for artistic innovation and
political rebellion at least since the 1930s. Frida Kahlo, Rivera and
others were championing a new Mexican art that drew on local traditions
and celebrated workers and farmers. Artists from the Europe and United
States, including Tina Modotti and Edward Weston, rushed down to imbibe
the atmosphere and the inspiration.

In this heady climate, DeGrazia scored a solo show at the Palacio de
Bellas Artes. Orozco is quoted in a popular biography as praising
DeGrazia, saying, “He will be one of the best American painters
someday.”

But back in the United States, DeGrazia seems to have foundered. The
UA wasn’t interested in re-staging his Bellas Artes show.

DeGrazia knew his modernists, to be sure, but the TMA works suggest
an artist in search of a style. And somewhere along the line, for some
reason, he hit upon Southwest kitsch. The heroic
indígenas of Rivera’s best paintings evolved into the
faceless Indians-lite of DeGrazia’s.

DeGrazia was a great Tucson character, a tough, desert-fried macho
man and, mysteriously, the town’s most famous artist. Rivera had said
that the young man’s paintings interested him, but a prediction he made
was prescient. Ted, he declared, “will become a prominent
personality.”

This article appears in Jun 11-17, 2009.